The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China 9780804764063

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The Sublime Figure of History Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China

The Sublime Figure of History Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China

Ban Wang

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1997 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the L:nited States of America CIP data appear at the end of the book

To Xiaoyan and Emily

Acknowledgments

Ralph W. Emerson said that the origin of books is noble-the world came to the writer dead fact; now it is quick thought. This remark is increasingly untrue. Great beginnings do not protect books from paltry ends, even though authors still speak of the origins of their books as embryos of something great to come. Books, the greatest books, gather dust in obscure corners of libraries. They find their way to garage sales, used bookstores, flea markets. Finally they are pulped, and the paper is recycled to make new books. When I see such august names as Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Nietzsche, or freud, as well as those resounding titles of contemporary scholarship or theory- even those published six months ago-reduced to a dollar apiece in used bookstores, my heart sinks at the prospect of adding another vvork to the pile. The origin of this book is prosaic. It began in disenchantment and embarrassment. As I was growing up during the Cultural Revolution, I felt the strain of having to become more than I was. The postCultural Revolution period was one of enlightenment as well as disenchantment. I grew increasingly tired and suspicious of all the imperious demands that Communist culture had made of me and many of my generation This feeling colored my perception of heroism and transcendence, the grandiose, the epic, and the magnificent. These to me had crystallized into a cultural practice and an aesthetic discourse that can be described as sublime or chonggao. I felt a strong urge to de-

viii

Acknowledgments

stroy this grandiose posture, but I also wanted to look into it as an area of intellectual inquiry. The embarrassment comes from an experience with a Chinese film entitled Spring Sprouts. Made during the Cultural Revolution, the film is propaganda. It depicts the power struggle of the political lines at its most bombastic and distasteful, but I was moved to tears by its high-flown drama. I believe millions of Chinese had a similar experience, with other forms of propaganda if not with this particular film. Looking back, one is at a loss whether to laugh or cry. This may seem sheer folly now. But it was not folly, and I began this study by trying to come to terms with this experience through an analysis of the lures and traps of an authoritarian culture; it later expanded into an investigation of the aesthetic-political nexus of the culture that makes such massive "folly" possible. I attempted to build on this experience while writing my dissertation at UCLA during 1992-93. I gave two presentations at a seminar organized by Professor Leo Lee and benefited enormously from the suggestions and comments of the participants. These formed a critical group and included such critics and scholars as Chen Jianhua, Meng Yue, Ming Fengying, Shih Shu-mei, Wang Zhaohua, Wang Hui, Xu Zidong, and others too numerous to name. To me they were a constant source of inspiration and stimulation, and I think of them with gratitude. I am also grateful to Professors Maureen Robertson and Alan Nagel of the University of Iowa, who launched me into comparative literary studies. I thank Professors Samuel Weber and Calvin Bedient of UCLA, who introduced me to the Western aesthetic tradition. I thank Professor Haun Saussy for his insightful remarks and suggestions that prompted me to modify and revise the work. I am grateful to Professor Leo Lee, who enabled me to delve into historical contexts, helped me negotiate the similarities and differences between China and the West, and, while I was writing this book for publication, provided two formal occasions for me to present my work at conferences at Harvard University. I thank my colleague Sandy Petrey at SUNY, Stony Brook, for his constant encouragement and advise. I also thank the readers of the manuscript for their comments and suggestions. My special thanks go to John Ziemer of Stanford University Press: I feel extremely fortunate to have worked with him. Giving everybody a thank-you note reminds me of my middleschool years in China. When I won a prize or accomplished something, I was obliged to make a public announcement of gratitude. I

Acknowledgments

ix

had to attribute my accomplishment to everybody except myself-to the party, the leader, the local party organization or youth league, my instructors, the collective that surrounded me, my helpful classmates. It was a time when the very spark of individual initiative unsponsored by any collective wisdom was a sin, to be exposed and criticized at the next self-criticism session. Thus, it never ceases to strike me that authors in individualistic America, including now me, routinely and ritualistically thank other people in a way that makes their creations sound as if they were collective enterprises. I do not want to seem ungrateful, but for better or worse this book sees the light of day largely because of my own labor and was mainly written at snatched intervals between classes and committees, with a summer thrown in. I will have no one except myself to blame for any flaws that the book has. An earlier portion of Chapter 1 was published in the Chineselanguage journal Xue ren (The Scholar) 6 (1994): 551-71. A longer version of the section in Chapter 2 on Benjamin and Hegel was published in the inaugural issue of the journal Prosthesis 1 (Summer 1992): 89105. Two portions of Chapters 5 and 7 were combined and published as a self-contained essay in Comparative Literature 47, no. 4 (Fall1995): 330-53. The section "The Real Under Scrutiny" of Chapter 7 was published in Tamkang Review 21, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 149-65. All transcriptions of Chinese are in pinyin, except for cases in which theW a de-Giles system was used in a quoted text. B.W.

Contents

Introduction

1 2

1

Sublimation unto Death: The Aesthetic Search for Meaning in Cultural Crisis

17

Writing China: The Imaginary Body and Allegorical Wilderness

55

3

The Sublime and Gender

101

4

Desire and Pleasure in Revolutionary Cinema

123

5

The Sublime Subject of Practice

155

6

The Cultural Revolution: A Terrible Beauty Is Born

194

7

The Angels of History: The Fantastic, Schizophrenic, and Grotesque

229

Conclusion

263

Notes

271

Character List

287

Bibliography

293

Index

305

The Sublime Figure of History Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China

Introduction

I want to explore various aesthetic means by which the political image of the individual has been envisioned and forged in twentiethcentury China. What, for example, has it meant to be an individual, to possess a personal and collective identity, in the turbulent history of twentieth-century China? What do the shapes of self look like within various ideological discourses and aesthetic forms such as literature and film? What are the symbolic and mental resources that have fueled individual and collective aspirations and been used to heal the wounds and despairs of modern Chinese history? What is an individual supposed to be, in addition to his or her creaturely inclinations for food and sex? With what figure should one identify in order to be larger, stronger, and loftier than one's mundane self, to pull oneself out of the mire of the everyday and the instinctual, and to generate meaning out of the bewildering nonsense of history? Modern Chinese literature and culture have busily put one figure after another on the pedestal for us to admire and emulate. From May Fourth to June Fourth, Chinese culture has never ceased to search for a sublime, lofty Hero. If the grand narrative of modern Chinese history is a tragic drama, the spectator has been induced to endow the dominant actor with sublime qualities. This study is not meant to be an essay on the sublime. It is not a study of the sublime as a mere aesthetic category within the academic "discipline of aesthetics" aimed at describing a concept with hairsplitting finesse. Rather, I want to examine a mythically conceived

2

Introduction

and constantly invoked figure that I venture to call the "sublime figure." This figure is not only an exemplar for imaginary identification in the formation of certain types of individual and group identity but also opens itself up to the broader cultural situation this book intends to address: the interplay between the aesthetic and the political. I begin by defining, in an inescapably simplistic way, what I mean by the three terms in the title: sublime, figure, and history. First, the sublime. Instead of quoting Kant, whose account of the sublime I invoke with varying degrees of subtlety and complication in this book, I will cite the late Thomas Weiskel. Weiskel has provided us with a definition with sublime simplicity: "The essential claim of the sublime is that man can, in speech and in feeling, transcend the human." 1 The transcendent domain may be the kingdom of God or the realm of pure reason and spiritual freedom; it may be a superhuman quality of which we stand in awe and to which we are exhorted to aspire; it may even be a People commissioned by History to carry out a grand utopian blueprint of human progress and emancipation. Whatever the domain is, the sublime can roughly be seen as a process of cultural edification and elevation, a vigorous striving for the lofty heights of personal and political perfection, a psychic defense mechanism designed to ward off dangers and threats, a constantly renewable heroic figure for popular emulation; a grand image of the body, or a crushing and uplifting experience ranging from the lowest depression to the highest rapture. It is by these processes and images that whatever smacks too much of the human creature-appetite, feeling, sensibility, sensuality, imagination, fear, passion, lust, self-interest-is purged and repressed so that the all-too-human is sublimated into the superhuman or even inhuman realm. "Figure," the second term to be defined, points to the subject, the concept of preference for denoting the makeup of the individual psyche, its conscious and unconscious workings, and all its social, cultural ramifications. But "figure" is more sensuous, imagistic, and specular, and it bears the traces of historical and cultural formations at their most visible and palpable. The figure can be a plastic figure, a figure of speech, a figure for mirror identification, or a historical figure enveloped in a mythical aura. I use the word to denote sensory or figural representations in contrast to the more abstract term "subject," which in current theoretical formulations has revealed its manifold, historically contingent figurations. Caught in sublime experiences, the subject is, as Julia Kristeva puts it, always on triaJ.2 This implies that

Introduction

3

the subject can hardly be defined as an individual or a self who possesses a central unified consciousness and is able to control his or her mental faculties and direct his or her action with full self-determination. This "autonomous subject," we have been told, has been demolished by the powerful critiques of various contemporary theories. True, the subject has to be conceived by resorting to a discursive construct, a set of beliefs about the self, a system of representation, a reservoir of symbolic resources, and so on. But this does not necessarily lead to the much heralded" demise of the subject." It is precisely those myths, representations, and ideologies that allow a certain historically active, politically urgent, and aesthetically appealing form of subjectivity to emerge. And it is also these formations that shape the subject's attributes, characteristics, and history in particular ideological and social circumstances. The subject is not treated in this study, as it would be in the best of all possible worlds, as the Subject-a conception that often underlies the notorious "aesthetic subject," who shares with everyone else a ready appreciation of timeless beauty that mirrors a timeless truth. In this study, the" subject" is a temporary and variable textual position, an opening in discourse, an affective structure or coloring, an imagistic network capable of generating various positions and effects of subjectivity or a precarious sense of self. The subject is indeed a mirage, but a workable, enticing, enabling, and at times debilitating mirage. The concept describes imaginary attempts to fashion an identity of self in the private and political life of a human being. It is an empty space waiting to be given historical and symbolic substance: always to be defined and constructed from discursive moment to discursive moment, from image to image, from text to text, from one biographical history to another, from one cultural instance to another. Every historical juncture provides ideologies and myths that contribute to the fashioning of the subject. In the following chapters, I reconstruct various shapes of the subject by looking at a number of aesthetic forms, literary and cinematic, that bear the imprint of the turbulent history of twentieth-century China. Of the three terms, "history" is probably the hardest to define and handle. There are ways to refer to history as a certain sequence of events or a period authorized by the consensus of historians. The opinion of historians is then circulated as "facts" in history books. Thus under such rubrics as the late Qing dynasty, the May Fourth, the post-49, or post-Mao, we can conveniently talk about a certain his tori-

4

Introduction

cal period. I use these labels but do not assume any necessary, lineal or generic continuity between the event under discussion and the one temporally adjacent to it. Each moment of history, although connected with other moments in many ways, arises from a particular configuration of circumstances that often eludes a sense of smooth continuity. It is also possible to speak about history not as something out there but as the work of the historian with the talent of the storyteller. Both historian and storyteller, as Hayden White has shown, rely on culturally prevalent types of plot and story in order to find the "right" facts and to configure them into a convincing historical sequence 3 Although I agree with this definition of history to an extent, I believe what we often refer to as "history" is precisely that which gives the lie to narrative and disrupts textual and symbolic ordering. Historical narrative is emplotment, but one that attempts to order a plotless history. To confront history is to run into an inescapable paradox between our desire to tell a story about the past and the inevitably arbitrary nature of such narrating acts in ordering those irrevocable, chaotic events and experiences. History does not animate our representation as a radiating soul does a body. On this point, many sensitive Chinese minds still smarting from the traumatic experiences of twentieth-century China share in a historical mood exemplified by the works of the German critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin pictures history as "a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions." Under the heedless, bleak sky in the wilderness- a stark image of history- stood "the tiny, fragile human body." This poignant image of human helplessness beneath an unresponsive, indifferent heaven finds further elucidation in Benjamin's observations about the allegorical nature of writing history. Historical narrative is allegorical, not symbolic, in the sense that there is always a jagged line between our attempts at making meaning and what has sunk forever into oblivion and death. 4 I witnessed in person the massive, medieval-style fighting and bloodshed during the Cultural Revolution and watched the bloody event of June Fourth in Tiananmen Square on television. Although private impressions are too transitory and incidental to constitute history, history nevertheless bristles with accidents and catastrophes. History seems to be the start that jerks one awake in the middle of night, the shock that forebodes an horrible and crushing calamity. The foreboding invariably turns out to be devastatingly real: what happened was death, murder, massacre, disappearance, injury, some in-

Introduction

5

comprehensible upheaval. History as a series of catastrophes and shocks finds a heart-wrenching emblem in Zhang Yimou's 1994 film To Live (Huo zhc). In this film some unexpected catastrophe always lies around the corner; some calamity is always about to fall out of the blue; something unspeakable constantly lurks beneath our faint attempt to survive, to speak, and to narrate. Recall the hospital scene in which the main female character, Fengxia, gives birth to a child but dies of complications for lack of medical care, since the Cultural Revolution is in full swing and the doctors have been banished from the hospital. The blood that screams at you, the quick shuffling of feet in confusion, the hysterical rushing from one room to another, everyone's helpless agony, and the end-of-world sense of universal doomthe Chinese critic Meng Yue has canonized such scenes, culled from numerous works of fiction, into a comprehensive image of Chinese history and society in the twentieth century. She calls it" zai bian," the catastrophic accidents For her, the catastrophe is a nightmare that cannot be fully interpreted and grasped, a darkness that cannot be fully illuminated and redeemed. History will ahvays slip through the net of our consciousness. Unless we refuse to look back or pretend to forget, unless we endorse what we know clearly to be a false account, the subject looking back at history, especially the history of the "ten-year calamity," is very much stranded between the positions of the psychoanalyst and the psychotic patient. All he can claim is no more than the memory and the record of the fact- the primal scene that caused the illness, plus the shivers, the nightmares, the cold sweat, the stomachache he and others suffer. But the relation between the two-that which constitutes meaning-has dissolved into vagueness and non-meaning beneath the threshold of consciousness. 6 To think about history is to become aware of those accidents, shocks, wounds, catastrophes, and traumas that have reached into the unconscious and been deposited there in the shape of shock-effects. These phenomena are likely to explode historical narratives and representations that seek to endow them with overarching meaning, continuity, or plot. This conception of history comes close to the Lacanian Real or Fredric Jameson's idea of history as an "absent cause." 7 History, in this sense, is that which hurts, that which trips us up. Contrary to this uncertain and grim vision is the official notion of a history mapped out with dead certainty. This notion is associated with the official aesthetic of the sublime. In it the broken pieces of

6

Introduction

history become assembled into a mythical, epic plot that marches on regardless of paltry human agency. History is turned into faith and theology. The individual has to ride on the historical tide and to strive to become the superhuman maker of history, or he will be swept into the dustbin. Thus a solemn aura of history-making suffused the age of Mao and reached a climax in the Cultural Revolution. What permits me to put the following seven chapters together in the space and time of twentieth-century China is an analysis of aesthetic reflections and works of literature and film aimed at forging individual and collective identities in response to the overwhelming exigencies and pressures of history. This is a history littered with numerous upheavals, wounds, transformations, and revolutions, a history in dire need of meaning. Yet this broken history has also been assigned a teleological trajectory that is too meaningful and too limiting. Thus throughout the following pages "history" should be enclosed in imagined quotation marks in order to set forth its ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity. The thesis of this study is that politics in modern China has been closely intertwined with aesthetic experience. As is well known, in modern Chinese culture anything worthy of the name "aesthetic experience" has in one way or another been infected with politics. But less well known is the fact that politics has been turned into aesthetic experience and on such a massive scale as to become a veritable cultural practice. Bv "aesthetic experience" I do not merely mean the experience proper to the creation and appreciation of art, literature, or film. Aesthetic experience (a classic example is art reception) embraces those experiences in the daily life of an individual and a community that are analogous to the experience of art. When we have an intensified perception of certain cultural forms or settings, certain rhythms or tenors of behavior, certain textures of living; when we enjoy great pleasure or even ecstasy in these forms, feel a heightened sensibility and consciousness, undergo an enrichment of the self's sensory and bodily capacities, we may be said to have an aesthetic experience. Suddenly we are experiencing normally inartistic life as if it were a work of art. Emotional impoverishment and sensory deprivation can also be aesthetic, because they suddenly call into question our aesthetic way of existing in the world. That is why images of death, ruins, and evil can be material for art and aesthetic contemplation. Rather than feel the agony of death, we sense something delicious, poignant, or even beautiful in a morbid image. Aesthetic experience is

Introduction

7

about our perceptual, sensory, sensuous, emotional, and bodily experience. Although nurtured by the culture into unconscious habits, unthinking reflexes and expectations, this experience actively animates cultural forms with a sense of the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, or the ugly. This modern idea of the aesthetic stems from Western aesthetics. Since its initial reception in China, Western concepts of aesthetics have occupied a prominent place in various ideological discourses and been appropriated by Chinese thinkers and writers to deal with ethical, social, and political issues. Modern Chinese aesthetic discourse resulted from borrowings and appropriations. Chinese aesthetic discourse, which brings to mind such names as Wang Guowei, Cai Yuanpei, Lu Xun, Zhu Guangqian, Zong Baihua, Li Zehou, and others, is different from but related to aesthetic experience. This discourse and its practice are the place at which politics is often rendered into an aesthetic experience. I intend to inquire how the various brands of politics in twentieth-century China have been couched in an aesthetic vocabulary and rendered into an aesthetic experience. This also reopens the older question of how aesthetic manifestations in art, literature, and public life came to be so intricately bound up with prevalent ideologies and existing relations of power. "Politics" here has a limited meaning: it is a politics of fashioning the image of the new man in a new culture. It refers to the various projects of fashioning a viable form of self or a workable image of the subject in the turbulent and crisis-ridden history of modern China. These projects include imagining a well-rounded subject adapted to the rising modern nation-state, mobilizing the revolutionary masses as subjects of the Communist state, sustaining a unified self in the crisis of traditional culture, and more recently, in the post-Mao period, debunking the grand narrative of revolution and the lofty heroic figure. This book seeks to delineate the ways the political masquerades as aesthetic experience and discourse and blends them into a realm of sensation, perception, feeling, image, representation, and myth. I >vant to demonstrate how the various political programs in twentieth-century China have been carried out not simply by political means but also by way of aesthetic experience and activities. The need to fashion a form of subjectivity in the face of the overwhelming exigencies of history has been approached in ways that intimately involve the bodily, sensuous, and emotional dimensions of the individual's lived experience. This approach has much to do with a person's

8

Introduction

preference and taste for what is beautiful and sublime. Here thecategory of the aesthetic is an effective tool for Chinese studies as well as cultural analysis. It helps to illuminate the relations between individual and society- between submission and domination, between governing imperatives and unconscious desire. The notion of the sublime is a nodal point in this interplay between the aesthetic and the political. Although the sublime is usually associated with classical German aesthetics, in today' s intellectual clime it has become impossible to speak of this category as something purely of "Western" provenance. This is true both in Chinese and in Western discourses. It is immediately apparent in looking at modern Chinese aesthetic discourse that much thought has been devoted to German aesthetics and the sublime. Chinese aesthetic discourse is marked by a persistent attempt to interpret and assimilate classical German aesthetics as represented by such figures as Kant, I-Iegel, and Schiller, among others. Central among the concerns of Chinese aesthetics is the category of the sublime. Wang Guowei, the "fountainhead" of the Chinese aesthetic enterprise, was drawn to Kant's analytic of the sublime and the theories of the Will elaborated by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Combining the German theories of the sublime with the Confucian doctrine of moral integrity and grandeur, Wang formulated a theory of "sublime personality" (zhuangmei renge)8 The theme of the sublime also informed Wang's literary criticism. In his reading of The Dream of the Red Clznmber, for instance, Wang applied his theory of sublime personality to the interpretation of tragic suicides in the novel. In the 1930's the mixture of Western theories and Chinese motifs in the writings of Zhu Guangqian and Liang Zongdai marks another high point in the Chinese interpretation of the sublime. Much more detached from traditional morality than Wang and well trained in Western scholarly methods, Zhu Guangqian worked out an elaborate theory of the sublime and the tragic by synthesizing the theories of Longinus, Kant, and Burke with such classical Chinese critical categories as the "manly and unyielding spirit" (ynnggang zlzi qi). 9 In contemporary Chinese aesthetic discourse, the sublime is rendered as c/wnggno (lofty and towering) and has been made, in the hands of the eminent aesthetician Li Zehou and others, to resonate with the language of Marxist historical materialism. It has become an aesthetic that furnishes a gigantic image of the People, the figure of the collective subject engaged in a world-transforming practice in order to carry out the telos of history. Indeed, more than their predeces-

Introduction

9

sors, contemporary Chinese aestheticians and critics have displayed a growing interest in the issue of the sublime and tend to privilege this category over its contrasting term, the beautiful. Given the enormous interpretive endeavor devoted to the sublime, it is no longer feasible to say that Chinese aestheticians are dealing merely with a borrowed concept. This would be tantamount to claiming that modern Chinese writers are not writing about Chinese experiences when they practice realism, romanticism, modernism, or other literary forms of Western vintage, but are merely parroting foreign ideas. Aesthetic thinking in modern China has so privileged the sublime and aesthetic writers from Wang Guowei and Cai Yuanpei to Zhu Guangqian and Li Zehou have bestowed so much thought on it that it would be absurd to view their labor merely as a disinterested academic study of a fascinating foreign concept. Moreover, the attempt to view the sublime as a hypostatic concept in Western aesthetics runs aground in the face of the complex recent vicissitudes of the term. Meanings of the sublime vary from context to context even in the Western tradition or traditions. In recent decades, critics of all stripes- post-structuralists, post-modernists, cultural critics, feminists, psychoanalysts, post-colonialists, and historians of the Holocaust- have done much to turn the sublime into a disruptive and subversive element within Western culture 10 To inventory the views and trends and controversy regarding this term would require a book by itself. Here I sketch only two strands of thought relevant to my present concern. One is the post-modern sublime, which seems to me sensitive to the understanding of cultural crisis. This conception is a twist on the Kantian sublime. It characterizes the sublime as a crisis in the status of the subject and the possibility of the subject's cognitive competence. In its experience of the sublime, the subject confronts a scene of unmeasurable and boundless magnitude or a sense of overwhelming force and terror. Such experiences are so shattering that the normal epistemological fabric and symbolic order that hold objects together as supports for the subject crumble and the ego verges on collapse. As Terry Eagleton puts it, it is "almost a commonplace of deconstructive thought to see the sublime as a point of fracture and fading, an abyssal undermining of metaphysical certitudes." 11 But throughout its varied career in Western aesthetics, the sublime has also been assigned the role of fashioning a subject that is larger than life and able to break through narrowly sensual human limitations to acquire epic and superhuman dimensions. In this con-

10

Introduction

structive role, the sublime elevates the ego and fortifies the subject buttressed by the Cartesian concept of autonomous, rational consciousness. This constructive tendency became codified into a tradition in the romantic sublime, as Thomas Weiskel brilliantly demonstJ·ates. The English word "sublime" has a number of Chinese translations. Wang Guowei used z/zwmgmei and /zongzhuang; Cai Yuanpei zhida and zlzigang (extremely grand and extremely strong); Zhu Guangqian xiongzeez (masculine and lofty). The most frequently used and notable term in current circulation is c/zonggno. Although I will have occasion below to deal with these translations, I do not mean to do a comparative study in the manner of a dinner party chat about how uncannily Fast and West think alike on the question of the sublime. Numerous attempts have been made to compare the "sublime" with similar notions in traditional Chinese criticism. For instance, classical notions such as yanggmzg zhi qi (manly and unyielding spirit), the idea ofjenggu (wind and bone) elaborated by Liu Xie in Tlzc Literary Mind and the Caroing of Dragons (VVcnxin diao long), and the concepts of xionghzm (the masculine whole or the undifferentiated) and /zaofang (powerful and free) advanced by Sikong Tu. These are some of the terms singled out as the conceptual counterparts of the sublime.l 2 I am not searching for an indigenous Chinese equivalent of the sublime in the hope of triumphantly declaring to my colleagues: "You know what? The sublime did exist in the Chinese tradition!" Instead I h·eat the sublime as a form of discursive practice rather than as a concept. I have set up discursive practice in opposition to the notion of "concept" to avoid the essentialist view of culture. The idea of concept often presupposes a reference to the same object and assumes a consistent semantic meaning and a transcendental subject capable of mastering the fixed conceptual significance. Dogmatic adherence to the purity of a concept, be it Western or Chinese, has worked to hamper fruitful" comparative" cultural and literary study. It tends to see a culturally specific idea as the" always already thought," as a fixed and immutable entity authorized by and sedimented once and for all in a tradition. As an exclusive property of a tradition, it puts up a No Trespassing sign that forbids outside tampering. By contrast," discursive practice" denotes ways of articulation and sees an idea as a set of articulatory maneuvers or gestures. It is an extended speech act performed by a creative agent who recomposes differential positions or concepts into a temporary ensemble in an ad hoc response to certain

Introduction

ll

social, political, and ideological circumstances. In this light, the discursive network of the Western sublime seems to have been revised and articulated into Chinese aesthetic discourse. Some knowledge of the Western origins of this discourse can provide a vantage point for us to understand and further articulate how Chinese theorists have engaged a "problematic," a set of questions surrounding the sublime. It is what people do with the sublime and how they do it that interest me, not the further fine-tuning of the fixed meaning of the term. This also involves what I can do with Chinese aesthetic discourse. My description of the performance of critics and writers does not rule out my own speech acts on them. Lu Xun and the post-Mao writers whom I discuss here have little to do directly with the sublime, simply because they do not refer to the concept explicitly in their texts. But this has not prevented some of their works from being read as "sublime" texts. There are sublime critics around who, equipped with the already full-fledged Chinese discourse of clzonggao, have not failed to locate the sublime wherever texts are liable to such a reading. If I consider myself in the company of these critics, what I seek to accomplish is not to apply Western theories of the sublime directly to Chinese texts but to read those texts within the framework of an aesthetic discourse and a political practice understandable in terms of the sublime or clwnggao. For instance, Lu Xun does not discuss the sublime per se, yet some of his writings have been pulled into the cultural orbit of the sublime. This allows me to read Lu Xun's "On the Power of Mara Poetry" ("Moluo shi li shuo") as evocative of some formal and generic features of the sublime in general and as playing into the Chinese discourse of chonggao in particular. I also hope to bring out the critical potential of some notions of the sublime in contemporary Western discourse, those that have not been assimilated into Chinese discourse. This critical sublime inspires me to read post-Mao writers as effecting a powerful desublimation. Desublimation is also a form of the sublime-not the sublime of transcendence but the sublime of the abyssal undermining of the grand narratives. The sublime is thus a politically ambivalent category corresponding to a similar ambivalence in the category of the aesthetic. As a "humanizing" discourse on private feelings, perception, bodily sensations rooted in the libidinal dimension of the individual, the aesthetic offers emancipatory alternatives to an oppressive political structure. But precisely because it attends to the psychic depths of the individual, the state can employ it to anchor its power

12

In traduction

and laws all the more securely in the sensibilities of its subjects. A slogan of the Cultural Revolution exhorted that the supreme directives of the great leader Mao Zedong should be printed in our brains, dissolved in our blood, and materialized in our actions. This captures the dream state of any hegemonic power. The Janus-faced aesthetic, as well as the double-edged sublime, will be explored for their tendency to liberate or to oppress. The organizing principle of this study is not historical but thematic. I choose instances or moments in twentieth-century China to discuss various aspects of the relation of the aesthetic to the political. In Chapter 1, I attempt to situate Chinese appropriations of Western aesthetics within the broad context of the nationalistic program of constructing a new people at the turn of the century. This departs from current studies in mainland China. Many aestheticians tend to see their subject as a pure science of beauty on a par with the social sciences. I attempt to unearth the ideologies within the aesthetic enterprise through a reinterpretation of the seminal figure Wang Guowei. As a scholar who initiated the study of Western aesthetics in China, Wang made painful efforts to anchor epistemological security in the medium of lived experience and in the image of the beautiful, especially in the concept of 1ingjie (world). Failing in this, he turned to the sublime as the last resort for maintaining a form of the subject, which paradoxically turns out to be the death of the subject. Chapter 2 analyzes how the discourse of the body, motivated again by the nationalistic agenda of self-strengthening, has been articulated with the aesthetic. I first offer a reading of Lu Xun' s long essay "On the Power of Mara Poetry," which poeticizes the power of the body and heralds the sublime body of a new people. The aesthetic here is defined specifically as an organic language of nature and body. With this language, Lu Xun and others wrote the "essence" of China into an apotheosis of the new people to come. A strand of May Fourth culture most susceptible to Communist appropriations, this organic language lent support to the grand representation of revolution and the collective subject. It was called into question by Lu Xun himself and much more aesthetically by Eileen Chang's fiction. The allegorical mode of writing utilized by those hvo '"'riters undermines the transparency of the organic language. By doing so, the Lu Xun of Wild Grass (Yecno) and Eileen Chang affirmed the private, the singular, and the heterogeneous against the grand narrative.

Introduction

13

Chapter 3 traces the motif of grandeur in traditional Chinese aesthetics in relation to the questions of gender and sexuality. I examine modern permutations of this matrix in Mao Zedong's poems and aesthetic writings by Zhu Guangqian and Liang Zongdai. After elucidating the masculine aesthetic of yang (manly and masculine), I explore how it has been disrupted by the yin (the feminine). The Chinese sublime or chonggao, whether in its traditional form or modern variant, is maintained through a continuous exclusion and suppression of the yin tradition. Yin has been an underprivileged strand of thought and structure of feeling in modern Chinese aesthetics and literature. Zhu Guangqian tends to exclude the feminine from the presentation of the sublime. Mao's poetry, often regarded as a compelling example of the sublime motif, illustrates a dramatic process of sublimation. It envisions a superhuman revolutionary figure that thrives by suppressing sexual differences and by purging itself of the emotional and affective, of the bodily and feminine, of sexuality and desire. The post-Mao revolt against the aesthetic of the sublime has arisen in part as a revitalization of the yin aesthetic. Yet Liang Zongdai seems to have been the first to make an explicit modern statement of this "feminine" aesthetic. In a rejoinder to Zhu Guangqian, Liang turns the traditional motif of yin into an aesthetic that may be called the" feminine sublime." It is an aesthetic that takes seriously forces of the unconscious, the bodily, and the maternal. In his description of the sublime, Liang draws a picture of chaos, in which the distinction of subject and object breaks down, and linguistic structures and consciousness collapse before the dark, primal force of an unfathomable "nature." Sublimation-the converting of libidinal energies to serve culturally acceptable goals- defines the psychic mechanism of Chinese revolutionary cinema. In Chapter 4, I take a close look at Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi gc), Nic Er, and other revolutionary films and explore the ways in which revolutionary film has employed various cinematic strategies in the service of Communist ideology. I examine how the politics of the centralized state has been transformed and reconstituted as a collective, communal art form- an aestheticized politicswhich has held a tremendous sway on the ideologically conditioned audience. The revolutionary film has made a strong affective appeal to the audience's unconscious. Instead of rehearsing indoctrination abstractly, it has solicited an imaginary identification with the "ideal"

14

Introduction

cinematic images drawn from the depository of traditional or popular images of Chinese culture. It has then proceeded to propel the viewing subject out of the imaginary realm and to sublimate him or her into the symbolic order. In other words, the revolutionary film has reproduced subjects of the state affectively rather than discursively. The grand representation of revolution and history, one of the legacies of the May Fourth cultural movement, was made even grander by Marxist aesthetics. ln Chapter 5, I discuss the aesthetics of the sublime in the age of Mao. In the hands of the eminent aesthetic ian Li Zehou and others, the Western sublime was pressed into the service of the grand narrative of the "continuous revolution." It was represented as a gigantic figure, representing the People: the collective subject engaged in the practice of transforming the world. As literary illustrations, I analyze some of Mao's poems, which were applauded as the culmination of this sublime embodied in the towering figure of the leader. Chapter 6 looks at the Cultural Revolution from the dual perspective of the aesthetic and psychoanalysis. This perspective entails some intriguing questions whose significance extends beyond the Cultural Revolution to the wider field of contemporary culture under Communism. What were, I ask, the emotional effects of those huge rallies in Tiananmen Square on the Red Guards? What was the nature of the mass mind running wild? What were the unifying principles or images by which a mass organization bound itself together? How did the towering figure of the leader function in the group mind? What gave rise to the intense Jove and worship of Mao? What was the aesthetic character of pleasure and displeasure experienced by the Red Guards and others? What was the function of the newly emerging revolutionary rituals that spread across the nation? What was the psychic mechanism that compeJJed a vast segment of the population to practice a masochistic self-criticism? How did this practice of selfcriticism contribute to the power of the authorities? l hope this perspective on the Cultural Revolution will contribute to current scholarship, which has leaned too much toward political science, sociology, and historiography. In this space between politics and aesthetics, the pendulum has swung, in the post-Mao era, toward a cultural tendency to demolish the ideals of the sublime. Chapter 7 looks at the counter-discourse or, desublimation, represented by the New Wave Fiction, which flour-

Introduction

15

ished after the mid-1980's. I concentrate on works by Yu Hua and Can Xue. Three prominent features stand out in the aesthetic-political discourse of the sublime: the teleological vision of history, the materialistic conception of the real, and the sublime subject as the maker of history. These are what the desublimation sets out to rout. The two writers wreak havoc with the grand narrative and its narrative machineries, employing the aesthetic strategies of the grotesque, the fantastic, and the schizophrenic. The grotesque effects formal and generic dislocations as opposed to the generic features of socialist realism. The fantastic is deployed to demystify the "iron laws" of the real and history. The schizophrenic breaks up the image of the unified, sublime subject of the State. The relation of art and literature to politics in modern China is an old topic, and there has been no lack of research keeping the scholarly conversation alive. By drawing a trajectory of the way politics has meshed with the aesthetic, I propose to move the discussion to a new terrain. My hope is that the aesthetic-political framework will reveal something crucial about Chinese culture in its drive to become a modern society. The question is no longer how in modern times art and literature have been made to serve the purposes of nationalism, revolution, propaganda, collectivization, mass movements, the ideology and policy of the centralized state, or other political projects. Rather, it has become how politics can be made to look and feel like art; how it can be and has been made to take on the intensity, passion, pleasure, and pain of the individual's lived experience. And this experience is both political and aesthetic, both public and intimate. Politics is still about power, but not power in the shapes of policy, law, control, organization, or factionalism- matters amenable to study by political science- but a form of power implanted and operative in the inner sphere of the individual's mind, feelings, and tastes, power embedded in the symbolic activities and perceptual patterns by which wegenerate meaning and evolve culture. In this regard, politics does not borrow the garb of aesthetics to dress itself up but is itself fleshed out as a form of art and symbolic activity. The implications of this understanding are far-reaching. This view may account for the rise and preeminence of aesthetic studies in China at the turn of the twentieth century, alert us to the symbolic and emotive means of imagining a national community and collective identity, and make us look afresh at Communist culture in a less dismissive, unreflective way. It may

16

Introduction

also enable us to question the separateness of high-brow art and "dirty" politics, to explain the voluntary self-sacrifice of millions of individuals for collective causes often detrimental to their own interests, and to illuminate in a new way the perennial question of therelation between individual and society.

1 Sublimation unto Death: The Aesthetic Search for Meaning in Cultural Crisis ... if man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through tile problem of tile aestlzetic, because it is on/ y through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom. -Friedrich Schiller

The study of aesthetics has been and remains a major intellectual and cultural activity in twentieth-century China. In the People's Republic, aesthetics as a discipline has been a university course with standard textbooks. The aesthetics curriculum was officially launched in 1960, when the country was experiencing natural disasters, famine, and political instability. Even more surprising is the fact that, two years later, a course called History of Western Aesthetics was launched as part of the curriculum in the Party School, the training ground for high-ranking party leaders. This aesthetic curriculum was one result of the officially sponsored" aesthetics debate," which began in 1956 and continued through 1962, an undertaking that involved a dozen prominent scholars and aestheticians, whose articles were published in a number of state-run and highly visible journals and newspapers. The fate of publications on aesthetics is no less intriguing. Kant's Critique of Judgment, translated by the renowned aesthetic ian and poet Zong Baihua, was published in 1964, shortly before the nation was inundated by the small red books of Mao's quotations. In 1985 Kant's book was reprinted, and 12,500 copies sold instantly. 1 As early as the late 1950's, the aesthetician Zhu Guangqian undertook the daunting task of translating Hegel's multivolume Aesthetics, and the first vol-

18

Sublilllafion llllto Oentlz

ume was published in 1959. Despite the many subsequent political upheavals, the other volumes were published from 1979 through 1981, and the book has remained a bestseller. 2 Apart from numerous journals and books devoted to the study of aesthetics, a number of books have served as staples for an enthusiastic reading public and scholarly communities since the early 1980's: A Histon1 ofvVestern Aesthetics (Xifmzg meixue slzi) by Zhu Guangqian, History of Chinese Aesthetics (Ziw11gguo meixue sili) co-authored by Li Zehou and Liu Gangji, and Stages on tlzc VVay to Beauty (Mel de lie/zen g) by Li Zehou. Being called an "aesthetician" in China today does not provoke the suspicion that one is engaged in some esoteric activity like, say, alchemy. Rather, the profession of aesthetician is institutionally structured, officially recognized, and socially esteemed. It is no less respectable than the profession of \\Titer. Not only are there professional niches and slots- positions, programs, departments, and centers for aesthetic study- but books are written to examine and critique works by aestheticians themselves. In a recent publication drive, seven books were published as the initial offerings in a series, each devoted to the study of a major contemporary aesthetician and his achievements 3 The primacy assigned to the study of aesthetics should be clear from this sketchy description and should enable us to raise questions that are often ignored in the hasty and simplistic critique of the authoritarian character of Chinese culture in the past four decades. If Chinese culture under Communism is dominated by ideological control and political collectivization, why the stress on aesthetics? Why is the dominant system so willing to give credit to such a "bourgeois" category? The aesthetic, as Raymond Williams has pointed out in a comment on its history, is an affirmation of "certain human meanings and values which a dominant social system reduced and even tried to exclude." "Its history," he goes on to say, "is in large part a protest against the forcing of all experience into instrumentality ('utility'), and of all things into commodities." 4 If the aesthetic contains a potential for protest and a promise of freedom for the individual human being, why is the ruling regime ready to endorse and embrace that discourse? What does the study of aesthetics, which deals with human perceptions, feelings, and experiences of art, have to do with Chinese political culture? What is the relationship between the aesthetic and the political? What do the officially sanctioned aesthetic modes have to do with socialist realism? What ideological agendas and political implications can we read from the apparently theoretical, "scientific"

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19

discussions on art, literature, and beauty? These are the questions that I address throughoutthis book. In this chapter, I question an important feature of this aestheticpolitical nexus: the separation of the aesthetic from the ideological and political. Chinese culture is heavily political, yet paradoxically contemporary Chinese aesthetic discourse has tended to approach aesthetics as a discipline that inquires into the "objective laws" of beauty in nature and society. On another level, aesthetics is regarded as a study of the "intrinsic" patterns of art and literature, free of ideology and politics. Even if there are attempts to broaden the aesthetic to encompass the "lived" relation of the individual to reality in general, the aesthetic is still regarded in a reductive fashion as an aspect of a pregiven social reality 5 This approach puts the study of aesthetics on the same level as scientific research. This may be one reason why it enjoys the same prestige as the other "social sciences." Although such a study, like all other cultural activities in China, is intended to serve socialist culture, it is not recognized as blatantly ideological and doctrinal: it is bourgeois and idealist aesthetics that is ideological and false, not Marxist aesthetics- a science that studies dimensions of the beautiful and the sublime in the objective laws of nature and human society. This reasoning also enables the study of the works of aesthetic writers in pre-modern China and their contributions to this "universal" science. It is my intention, in Clifford Geertz's words, to look "less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords." 6 At the turn of the twentieth century, the initial endeavors of Chinese intellectuals to introduce, interpret, and appropriate Western aesthetics pointed to a much more complex picture. Aesthetics was seen as one candidate, alongside technology and social theories borrowed from the West, to save a culture on the brink of collapse. This phenomenon was particularly poignant in the case of Wang Guowei, the fountainhead of the Chinese aesthetic enterprise. An examination of Wang's aesthetic writings reveals that the aesthetic theories Wang borrowed from the West and assimilated into traditional discourse were made to do a variety of jobs that are more unseemly or less universal than scientifically minded critics may think. Living in a time of political turmoil, cultural crisis, cognitive uncertainty, and personal distress, Wang Guowei resorted to the aesthetic in order to construct imaginary solutions to the urgent social, ideological, and epistemological problems of

20

Sublimation 1111to Death

his day. The trajectory of Wang's aesthetic reflection is fraught with complexities and contradictions. His aesthetic theory, which began as a project to fashion a form of self in response to historical challenges, ended up traversing various, often incompatible forms of subjectivity: the unified moral consciousness of a new people, the subject of knowledge capable of generating meaning and value in and of itself, the aesthetic subject ready to contemplate pure forms, and the sublime subject impervious to the onslaught of external threats arising from historical changes. The case of Wang Guo wei shows that an aesthetic theory, even in its most pure form and ethereal moment, is often tempered by historical context and invested with ideological motives. In its beginning, Chinese aesthetic discourse was already preoccupied with the welfare- the viable sense of self and identityof a specific individual in a specific historical situation and hence was ideologically and politically grounded.

The Aesthetic and the Social Wang Guowei (1877-1927) was a scholar of extraordinary accomplishments, in areas ranging from philosophy, aesthetics, historiography, and archaeology to literary criticism. A talented essayist and poet, he is also generally recognized as the first to have introduced Western aesthetic theories systematically into China and to have adopted the new perspectives in his writings on art and literature. Wang Guowei is often presented as a proponent of the sovereignty and autonomy of art. He is said to have been a champion of the sacred value of literature as opposed to its utilitarian function and traditional status as a didactic vehicle for moral messages. In her analysis of Wang Guowei' s views on literature, for instance, Ye Jiaying applauds Wang's persistent attempt to stake out an independent and sacrosanct territory for literature, serenely free from political entanglements and ethical concerns? This view is taken up by Michelle Yeh in her recent study tracing the evolution of Chinese poetry from traditional to modern. From the traditional notion of poetry as a vehicle for conveying the Confucian way and an instrument of moral edification, Chinese poetry since the May Fourth movement has been acquiring a new function. The new poetry deals in the subjective vagaries of perception, whimsically private glimmers of consciousness and the unconscious, exquisitely nuanced images, and, above all, pure forms and sounds of a rarefied poetic language. Wang Guowei stands at a crucial point in this transition. His contribution lies in his compelling pronounce-

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21

ments about art as a supreme value on a par with philosophy and in his refusal to enmesh art and literature in any utilitarian purpose. These views are taken as setting the tone for the theory behind the flourishing modernist "pure poetry" in the decades after the May Fourth movement. 8 Thus the image of Wang Guowei as a serene and refined connoisseur of taste engaged in a disinterested contemplation of beauty. This image rests on an assumption concerning Wang's intense interest in Kantian aesthetics, an assumption that has considerably narrowed the multiple functions of the category of the aesthetic. In this view, Kant's doctrine of the beautiful is based simply on the ideas of" disinterested contemplation" and" purposiveness without purpose" in a formalistic sense- ideas that, moreover, are often taken to be the source of modern aesthetic theories. It is customary to see Kant's theory as one that valorizes the aesthetic experience as a self-enclosed, self-referential activity and totality.9 Such an image comes more from the privileging of some of Kant's doctrines than from a comprehensive reading of the German philosopher's texts. Kant did not write the Critique of Judgment simply to propound a theory of disinterested aesthetic contemplation per se. A reading of Kant's texts as an interrelated body of writings reveals that his aesthetics does not make much sense unless we read the Critique of Judgment alongside the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. This is no place for an elaboration of Kant's three critiques. Briefly, we may cite Paul de Man concerning the place of the aesthetic in Kant in relation to epistemological, ethical, and political concerns. The aesthetic in Kant, de Man observes, "functions as a necessary, though problematic articulation." "In Kant the articulation of the first Critique with the Third, of the schemata of theoretical reason with those of practical reason, has to occur by way of the aesthetic." To rephrase this statement in a more straightforward language, we may say that in order to tackle ethical and political questions one has to resort to and explore the possibilities promised by the aesthetic mode of understanding and argument. Thus de Man asserts that the aesthetic in Kant is "epistemological as well as political through and through." 10 To present Wang Guowei as a cloistered aesthete and the harbinger of" pure art" in modern China seems to overlook the intensely political and moral concerns that engaged Wang throughout most of his life. True, political and moral issues, which concerned all Chinese in-

22

Sublimation unto Death

tellectuals and writers at this time of crisis, are not the most explicit subjects in Wang's aesthetic works, but they are nevertheless the subtexts or undercurrents beneath his writings. By articulating these concerns, we can qualify the alleged "aestheticism" of Wang. Wang Guowei's reputation as a champion of art and literahue surely stems from various arguments of his that privilege art and literature. But Wang's concern was aesthetic rather than merely artistic, and for him this meant situating art and literature in a broader context of society and culture. Indeed, Wang's voice was one of the strongest among the intellectuals and writers at the beginning of the century who took upon themselves to introduce and expound Western aesthetics. Liang Qichao (1873-1929) and Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940) were more visible in their public posture and efforts to push the aesthetic onto the front stage of the national scene and public debate. To promote awareness of the new subject, many talks and lectures were given, numerous articles were written and published, and a number of high-profile journals were launched. The interest in the aesthetic became so enormous that it would not be inappropriate to describe this cultural phenomenon as the "rise of the acsthetic."n But for all their efforts to promote the aesthetic, the notion, as Wang and other writers understood it, was not quite a self-enclosed, airtight discipline. They were not interested in the image of the aesthetic subject indulging in a self-delighting contemplation. Rather, the aesthetic was a category that comprised a broad range of ideological concerns and promised many solutions to real social and political problems. This can be glimpsed in their understanding of the term "aesthetic." For Cai Yuanpei and his contemporaries, the aesthetic did not refer simply to lessons in drawing and music in schools, or even abstract speculation and scholarly analysis about the origin and nature of beauty. The aesthetic fascinated them because it seemed to be an effective way of dealing with the world of human senses and emotions, and hence lent itself to the moral refinement and education of the populace. In his essay "On the Evolution of Aesthetics" ("Meixue de jinhua"), Cai discussed the German aesthetician Alexander Baumgarten's Aestlzetica, the seminal work in modern Western aesthetics, and stressed Baumgarten's citation of the Greek etymology of the word "aesthetic" as denoting feeling and sensation. 12 Cai Yuanpei was also dra>vn to the aesthetic for its affective value with respect to moral eel ucation. In a speech to the Scholarly Society of

Sublimation unto Death

23

China in 1917 with the title "On Aesthetic Education as Substitute for Religion" ("Yi meiyu dai zongjiao"), Cai assigned a religious function to the aesthetic. He observed that affective effects, or the feelings of the beautiful, are closely linked to religious experiences. To assert its power over believers, any system of faith has to rely on aesthetic means to produce emotional effect. Religious architecture (steeples, pagodas, temples) and religious art and literature (paintings, music, psalms, sermons, and scriptures) have aesthetic values: they can engage and make an impact on the feeling and senses of believers and cast a spell on them. But in modern times, with science and technology on the rise and religious faith on the wane, especially since many religions have proved to be sheer instruments of power and domination, aesthetic elements have drifted apart from the bankrupt systems of faith and came into their own. But despite all the superstitions and corruption of the institutional religions, the aesthetic mode whereby a religion organizes spiritual life, shapes the feelings and faith of its believers, and thus provides a frame of meaning and orientation should not be discarded along with religions. Aesthetic experience can be nurtured and cultivated so that the emotional structure of the people will develop along the path of noble habits and refined tastes, and their desires will be sublimated into higher ethical principles. Thus aesthetic education, Cai said, should not simply be conducted in the classroom, although educational institutions have a large obligation in this area. Aesthetic education should also include museums and art galleries, concert halls, and state-sponsored theater houses offering morally edifying plays. Consideration should also be given to the aesthetic layout and the appearance of city streets, to the design of public buildings and parks. Indeed, far from a secluded discipline and metaphysical speculation, the aesthetic is part and parcel of what civilized modern life is supposed to be. 13 All this, Cai declared, will serve the noble mission of cultivating and nurturing the new people of a new nation. Refined in taste and edified in morality, the individual will relinquish the egotistic tendency to benefit self at the expense of others. The individual so refined will be ready to join his or her fellow citizens in a community of noble feeling and morality to form a better society.1 4 As a substitute for doctrinaire and institutional religion, Cai called for a religion of the aesthetic. Here he presumed a form of religion that is devoid of institutional and doctrinal character but retains its affec-

24

Sublimation unto Dentlz

tive and political function. This secular notion of religion applies to cultures without visible religious institutions. It refers to a pattern of thought, action, and belief shared by a community that gives the individual a frame of spiritual orientation and an object of devotion. It also implies an affinity between the aesthetic and the political. Modern aesthetic thinkers in the West have also tended to elevate the aesthetic to the status of religion. Martin Heidegger credited Wagner, for example, with attempting to restore a religion of art. This art is the "collective artwork," which means that all arts would be conjoined in one work and should celebrate the national community. 15 In contemporary critical parlance, we may call this form of religion an ideology. The ideological function of religion, now fleshed out in the form of the aesthetic, was the concern of Cai' s contemporaries Liang Qichao and Wang Guowei. Liang Qichao is well known for his insistence on the aesthetic appeal of narrative fiction. For him fiction was not only the most aesthetically compelling literary genre easily accessible to the majority of the Chinese but also the most effective medium for shaping and regulating their moral complexion. In his celebrated essay "Fiction Seen in Relation to the Governing of the Masses" ("Xiaoshuo yu qun zhi zhi guanxi") Liang described, in Buddhist terminology, four kinds of emotive effect fiction is capable of producing, thus emphasizing fiction's mysterious and affective power of conversion in a religious sense. He even claimed that this affective power is the same force by which the religious leader sustains faith and a statesman organizes a party. 1" For him, religion is a more effective way of governing society and the masses than philosophical doctrines: "In terms of analyzing reason and argument, a religion is not as effective as philosophy, but when it comes to the matter of political government and control, a philosopher is no match for a religious leader." 17 In a similar vein, Wang Guowei also saw the aesthetic as having an ideological function akin to that of religion, but he was more sensitive to its relation to the innermost psyche and emotional depths. For him the new religion of aesthetics was capable of penetrating the "deep psychology" of the people. If Liang and Cai propounded the aesthetic in relation to political government and social development in general, Wang addressed specific social maladies. He considered the aesthetic-aesthetic education and experience of art-to be a cure for an emotionally depressed and morally degenerate society. In the essay "On Extirpating the Poison" ("Qu du pian"), for instance, he analyzed

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25

the emotional origin of opium addiction and prescribed the aesthetic as a cure. Opium addiction had been rampant in China since the early nineteenth century, and the Qing government had issued decrees to ban the importation of opium. Lamenting that China had become a nation of addicts, Wang suggested a cure for the disease. With the sensitivity of a social psychologist, he associated the epidemic with the emotional well-being or affective structure of the population. The Chinese are addicted to opium, he said, not because they are ignorant, for the educated class are not free from the habit, nor because they lack moral integrity. The main reason is to be found in the psychical state of the people: they are suffering from anxiety, emptiness, and hopelessness. 18 Taken in isolation, these psychic ills may sound abstract and too vague to be a diagnosis, for who is without moments of anxiety and despair? This is especially true when Wang lapsed into his favorite Schopenhauerian language about the insatiability of human desire, the inescapable anxiety and suffering of human existence-a language that in its sweeping generalizations does more to obscure than to clarify the issue. The diagnosis, however, became significant when Wang drew attention to the historical context-the threat to the existence of the empire and the prospect of becoming colonial subjects of the imperialist powers. The acute recent memory of the defeats at the hands of the Western powers and the realization of China's weakness were a traumatic shock for many Chinese, who responded with fear, anxiety, and despair. With the balance tipped in favor of the Western powers, Wang perceived opium addiction as a sign of China's powerlessness and the weakness of the national character: "The disease of Westerners is in the addiction to liquor; that of Chinese is in the addiction to opium .... The former is the disease of the young and the strong; the latter that of the old and declining. The former is the disease of a strong nation, whereas the latter is that of an enslaved nation" (WGTQJ, 5: 1872). The cure for opium addiction requires political measures to ban opium and education to cultivate knowledge and morality. But more important than these is a cure that can effectively treat the people's psychological well-being. This emotional illness, Wang maintained, should be treated through emotional means. Wang prescribed religion for the common people and the fine arts for the educated elite.

26

Sublimntion unto Dcntlz

Wang's alignment of religion with art as an avenue of emotional appeasement, like the views of Cai Yuanpei and Liang Qichao, can be attributed to the artistic function of religion and the religious function of art. Both religion and art can be effective ideological formations. With the "failure of religion" as an ideology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West, the artistic function of religion was gradually replaced by the religious function of art, which culminated in romanticism and the cult of art for art's sake. Religion and art, as Eagleton notes, both deal in symbols, images, values, and structures of feeling rather than explicit concepts and discursive argumentation, and hence are" affective and experiential," entwining themselves with "the deepest unconscious roots of the human subjects." 19 As a student of German aesthetic philosophy, Wang was convinced of the importance of the aesthetic both in social and political life and in the emotional and psychic well-being of the individual. With the invasion of the Western powers and importation of Western learning, Confucianism- the traditionally reliable and powerful ideology- was well on its way to bankruptcy. Faced with a crisis of ideology comparable to the "failure of religion" in the West, Wang called for the aesthetic as a religion for the Chinese. Although Wang averred that religion is for the lower classes and art for the upper classes, the difference between the two was not as essential for vVang as their identical emotive function. Both religion and art are capable of meeting the emotional needs and engaging the psychic depths of the people. Religion, Wang argued, can comfort andreassure ordinary people and sustain them through the sordid, harsh conditions of earthly life by giving them hopes of compensation beyond the grave. It is not that religion has any truth-value. Whether there is God or whether the soul remains alive after death is a question beyond human comprehension. Nor does any religion have an intrinsic value on its own: Buddhism is corrupt, and Christianity is but an instrument in the hands of the imperialists to expand their domination. But so long as a religion enables people to survive in this world and gives them hope and comfort, it can make a contribution to the nation and the people, and even unbelievers should pay it homage. The fine arts fulfill a similar emotional function. The emotional ills of the upper classes cannot be cured through the study of arid sciences or serious ethical doctrines. The mental emptiness of the educated elite can be filled only by an immersion in art, music, and literature, a

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quiet refuge where their hearts find rest and tranquillity (WGTQJ, 5: 1873-74).

The Aesthetic and Desire The best known of Wang's writings on literature are Remarks on Lyrics in the Human World (Renjinn cihua) and" A Critique of the Dream of the Red Chamber" (" Hongloumcng pinglun"). The aesthetic is a prominent category in the second text, and a brief look at it reveals how the aesthetic, even in a properly literary analysis, is articulated with questions beyond formalism and narrowly defined aesthetic standards. "A Critique of the Dream of the Red Chamber" is the best-structured piece of literary criticism Wang ever wrote. It presents its arguments in a step-by-step fashion reminiscent of a "typical" Western-style critical essay. This feature prompts Ye Jiaying to praise the novelty of its organization. The essay is a breakthrough in discursive style, she says, because it is based on a theoretical system, whereas the traditional style of Chinese critical writing is characterized by random remarks.20 The structure of the essay indeed merits attention. Of the five sections of the essay, the first presents a general overview of life and art, which elevates human desire to a metaphysical status. The second discusses the Dream in relation to the questions raised in the first section. The third and fourth address the aesthetic and the ethical values of the novel, and the fifth appears to be an independent unit discussing Wang's reservations about Schopenhauer's theory of desire and emancipation. The division of the "Critique" into, first, a meditation on desire and then an aesthetic assessment of the Dream followed by an analysis of its ethical implications confirms Ye Jiaying's claims about the discursive organization of Wang's essay. But more significant than the surface structure are the three major questions that underlie this tripartite structure: How do we know about the world and human life? How should we act? What do we find attractive? This thematic division into the cognitive, the ethical, and the aesthetic obviously corresponds to the structure that joins Kant's three Critiques. Wang hinted at the end of each section and the beginning of the next that none of these questions can be dealt with adequately without reference to another. The aesthetic, the central concern, makes adequate sense only in a concerted articulation with cognitive and ethical questions. This web

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Sublimation unto Death

of themes demystifies the image of Wang as a proponent of pure aestheticism. Cognitive concern in Wang's Critique is less a matter of epistemological possibilities and the limits of the human mind than an inquiry into the ultimate meaning of human life. Wang began his criticism of the Dream by asking: What is the ultimate essence of life, the essence that drives humans during the miserable and ceaseless struggle to preserve life day in and day out? This essence, Wang asserted, is nothing other than desire. For Wang, desire is by nature insatiable; desire arises from insufficiency and is always accompanied by misery and suffering. No sooner is one desire satisfied than ten others start plaguing the mind. And satisfied desire leads not to happiness but to boredom. Human life is "a pendulum swinging between misery and boredom" (WGTQJ, 5: 1630) This profile of desire as some airy Platonic essence may give the impression that Wang was blindly following Schopenhauer's philosophy of desire. Since Wang borrowed from a brand of "metaphysical pessimism," his views may seem out of tune with the Chinese situation and could be dismissed as little more than the private, idiosyncratic, and somewhat neurotic fantasy of a lonely and depressed scholar 21 But in Wang's time, adopting Western categories of any kind, no matter how abstract and ethereal, was hardly an idle fancy of an individual with too much time to kill. Several questions call for answers: Why, out of all the categories advanced by his German mentor, did Wang seize on desire as the central category in his texts? What were the circumstances- personal, ideological, political- that, all of a sudden, thrust desire into the discursive spotlight? What does the discourse on desire, which was most fully elaborated by Wang, tell us about the historical pressures on him and his generation? The category of desire loses some of its abstractness if vve examine the ways in which Wang linked desire to the practical interests of selfpreservation. All human beings, he wrote, have an instinctual need to survive, to be fed when hungry, to be clothed when cold, and to be sheltered against the elements. Apart from these instinctual bodily desires, the need to preserve the species leads to the desires to have sexual relations, form families, and organize society. In order to sustain the unity of society against harm and destruction from within and without, the" superstructures" of the state, law, police, and education are established and maintained. Wang places all these incessant

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drives and pursuits, suggestive of the tireless persistence of ants, under the rubric "relations of interest" (WGTQJ, 5: 1629). Desire not only is manifested in the practical pursuits of the individual and society but also finds expression in the will to power in a competitive society in which the individual's self-interest clashes with those of others. In the essay" A Study of Human Pastimes" ("Renjian shihao zhi yanjiu"), Wang depicted a social dynamics dominated by competitive self-interest. The only goal of each member is to gain power over others. "Human life consists in competition and triumph over others. So the ultimate Desire expresses itself as the will to power, striving to triumph over others in material and spiritual life. So we might as well call the will to power the child of the Desire for life" (WGTQJ, 5: 1797). Not only do the political and legal apparatuses stem from the relations of interest, but intellectual and cultural activities also derive from a desire to advance the practical self-interest of individuals and the species. To play chess and win, said Wang, is to savor in an innocuous and vicarious way the power one may gain over others, thus displacing the real and hurtful power struggle in practical life. Writing and reading literature vicariously fulfill one's desire to aggrandize one's power (WGTQJ, 5: 1798). Scientific pursuits and logical thinking are equally burdened with self-interest and power relations. In "A Critique of Dream of the Red Chamber," Wang gave a detailed account of how the logical operation of the mind in scientific research serves utilitarian interests. All knowledge is rooted in desire and related to our self-interest. Our knowledge begins with the need to study the relations between us and things, so that we may better fend off harm and reap benefits. We study only those aspects of things that interest us and serve our purposes. As our knowledge grows, we come to know the inherent relationships among things and see how part is related to whole and one entity to another. Then we establish laws to lay bare the objective relations among things. But these two types of scientific knowledge, one immediately utilitarian and hence interested, the other apparently objective and intrinsic, are in the final analysis grounded in their practical instrumentality in serving our interests and desires (WGTQJ, 5: 1631-1632). In Wang's discussion of desire, terms such as "competition," "self-interest," "will to power," and "utility" are quite prominent. These terms readily bring to mind the values of nineteenth-century capitalist culture in the West. This culture is often characterized as

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powered by the appetitive individual drive for profit and cut-throat competition as well as the attendant ideological formations of utilitarianism and instrumentalism. In using these terms, Wang was not simply echoing Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and attempting to depict the "ultimate way" of the world. This is not the place to dwell on the economic and social history of the period, which has been intensely investigated and documented elsewhere. Suffice it to say that Wang's discussion of desire had specific resonances at a juncture in Chinese history when the capitalist mode of production and the growing market economy, through the invasions of the Western powers, were encroaching on the old agrarian mode of production. His was a time when imported ideas like science, technology, competition, power, and utility were finding their way into the consciousness of educated Chinese. Under these circumstances, the understanding of desire, as an instance of the general structure of affect, underwent radical change. In the more integrated traditional culture, as some studies have shown, affects are intimately bound up with the "natural" ethical obligations of the individual, who is regarded not as a private and unique person but as a member of society and of the family, as the subject of the nobility and the monarch. Desire as such, as a "thing in itself" existing independently of interpersonal and political networks, is a radical deviation rather than a norm in a society organized on Confucian principles. 22 How desire had drifted apart from its ethical bondage to become an abstract, isolated category is a difficult and complex question far beyond the scope of this inquiry. But one thing that can be said is that the consb·uction of desire as a metaphysical entity is inseparable from the disintegration of the traditional culture in its confrontation with Western culture. For Wang, the prevailing materialistic and utilitarian tendency expands endlessly. Desire, which resembles an insatiable and monstrous beast cut loose from all traditional emotional and ideological bonds, becomes a figure representing an ever-expanding force for change. In Wang's critique of the Dream and other essays, we can discern how desire is incarnate in empirical life and how historical circumstances creep into the discourse on desire. In the essay "On the Sacred Mission of Philosophers and Artists" ("Lun zhexue jia yu meishu jia zhi tianzhi"), he linked the then prevalent form of utilitarianism with desire. As far as desire is concerned, humans do not differ from ani-

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31

mals. It is the job of politicians and businessmen to satisfy human desire. In this respect scientists are also a part of this utilitarian activity, for, as I noted above, logical and analytical investigations of the "objective" laws of things are also "interested," driven by the motivation to understand how external things can be used to preserve individuals and the species. Empirical forms of knowledge, such as the natural sciences, economics, ethics, and social theory, only serve immediate interests and the profit motive and have little to do with spirit and consciousness. Wang strongly rejected the utilitarian tendency in an essay on the introduction of Western learning. He lamented that the translations and introductions of Yan Fu and others concentrated on empirical knowledge and were subordinate to political purposes. He deplored the fact that most overseas Chinese students in the West studied law, engineering, and the like (WGTQJ, 5: 1735-41). For Wang, the worst aspect of this utilitarian tendency was that it had contaminated the sacred domains of literature and philosophy, which should have some autonomous status. In an increasingly market-oriented society, Wang noted, writing literary works was beginning to be a way to make a living. Literature as a way to earn one's keep was abhorrent and blasphemous. In criticizing such literature, Wang invoked a didactic h·adition of Chinese literature that practiced literary writing as a mere instrument toward career promotion, political control, and moral edification-no less abominable, for Wang, in its way than the new technological utilitarianism (VVGTQJ, 5: 1750, 1840). A life driven by the desire to satisfy petty material instincts for survival is barren of meaning and consolation. It is an existence in which, in Henry David Thoreau's apt description, the multitude live in quiet desperation. All, however, is not lost. There is something, Wang reminds us, that will allow us to rise above the constraints of self-interest and enable us to forget the interested relations that bind us to things- the aesthetic. The aesthetic concerns the beautiful. "The essential feature of beauty, in a word, is something that can be appreciated in a playful contemplation but cannot be utilized. Although once in a while we can utilize a beautiful object, a person by no means takes its useful features into consideration while engaged in aesthetic contemplation of it" (wcTQJ, 5: 1831). In aesthetic contemplation, "our hearts are freed from hopes and fears; we are no longer a self that desires but a subject that engages in a pure act of knowing" (WGTQJ, 5: 1633).

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Wang's attempt to elaborate the aesthetic condition led him to slip from a high philosophical discourse into a richly poetic language laden with images and ideas from the Daoist, Buddhist, and even Christian traditions. Aesthetic experience, for instance, is like a vehicle that delivers us to the great beyond: we float on the stormy sea till we arrive at" the home shore"; it is like a blessing and a message received from the winged angels in the midst of dark clouds. Aesthetic freedom is the freedom of a fish that has escaped a net, or "a bird that has flown out of the cage and soars freely over the mountains and rivers." The aesthetic way to contemplate things is the one adopted by the Daoist philosophers Zhuang Zi and Hui Zi as they were watching fish swimming in a river: there was only the enjoyment of the pure drift and movements of fish and nothing of the fisherman's interest in the catch. These are conventional images in Chinese poetry and philosophy that envision an otherworldly utopian refuge, an ascetic escape, a haven from the mundane entanglements. Placed alongside German aesthetics, these images complement Western aesthetic discourse and acquire additional signifying power (WGTQJ, 5: 1633-34). Aesthetic experience opens up a path of emancipation for us, freeing us from desire and the hopeless struggle for survival. Two aesthetic categories, the beautiful and the sublime, can be understood through their relevance to this emancipatory potential. Numerous studies have discussed Wang Guowei' s account of the two aesthetic categories borrowed from German aesthetics, but the discussion has tended to isolate these categories from the general corpus of Wang's texts and treat them as a scholarly exercise in distinction and definition.21 The two concepts obviously occupy an important place in Wang's writings. More interpretive work is needed, and connections have to be made behveen the different strata of Wang's discourse to bring these seemingly isolated concepts in line with the general thrust of his aesthetics. Wang did not distinguish the beautiful and the sublime as a pair of sharply distinct concepts. He was interested more in the similarity of their functions in freeing us from desire. There are two kinds of beauty: the beautiful [youmei] and the sublime [zhuangmei]. If an object is unrelated to our personal interest, and we can look at the object itself without worrying about its relations to us- in other words, if we look at the object as such with a mind totally free from the will to life- then what we see at this moment is dif-

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ferent from what we saw before. The state of peace and harmony at this moment can be termed the "perception of the beautiful," and we can call the object "beautiful." When an object directly hostile to our will confronts us and violently tears up our will and dissolves it, so that our cognitive faculty assumes independence and we penetrate deep into the thing itself, we call this object "sublime" and the feeling that of" sublimity." (WGTQJ, 5: 1634-35) The beautiful and the sublime thus give us pleasure by tearing us away from the relations of interest that bind us to things. Several points in this passage need further elaboration. First, in the state of the beautiful, the aesthetic subject looks at the object as such, as something cut off from the myriads of other objects. How is it possible for the object to have aesthetic appeal? Wang suggested that aesthetic appeal derives from the external form of the object. In the essay "On the Place of the Elegant in Aesthetics" ("Lun guya zhi zai meixue shang de weizhi"), Wang elaborated on the elements that constitute the beautiful object. An object's beauty stems not from objective properties and materials but from a form that confers a shape on the object. Everything that is beautiful (youmei) "may be said to derive its beauty from the symmetry, \;ariation, and harmony of its form. With respect to objects that are sublime [hongzhuang], it is true that Kant said that they are formless. However, since they are able by means of this type of formless form to evoke feelings of the sublime, they may yet be said to possess a type of form" (WGTQJ, 5: 1832). This insistence on pure form- formal qualities of symmetry, variation, and harmony-may confirm that Wang was after all, as critics have said, a run-of-the-mill formalist keeping faith with aestheticism and obsessed with geometrical forms for their own sake. Above we saw Wang's argument that the aesthetic subject is a subject of pure knowledge, delivered out of the will and desire. What is this pure knowledge? For Wang, knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is something at the service of the will and desire; it is a practical instrument for self-preservation. Thus, the possession of knowledge will not free us. The knowledge of the "pure knowing subject" in aesthetic experience certainly is not instrumental in nature. Since what shines forth from objects of beauty is form, the knowledge may be one of pure form. Thus, the aesthetic subject is a subject capable of taking pleasure in owning a knowledge of pure forms-forms of symmetry, variation, and harmony. And this preoccupation with forms is crucial

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to the question of how a chaotic world can be made both beautiful and meaningful.

The

~'\!orld on

the Model of Art

As a serious reader of Kant and Schopenhauer, Wang Guowei was aware that form is more than a factor in beauty; it also has a function in understanding the world. Form enables us to apprehend reality and facilitates our cognitive as well as our aesthetic capacities. In his elaboration of pure form, Wang moved back and forth between the aesthetic and cognitive domains. In a long essay entitled "An Analysis of Reason" ("Shi li"), the idea of form is a key term in his analysis of the term "reason." Drawing on classical Chinese sources and the arguments of Schopenhauer and Kant, Wang made the central claim that what is called "reason" in Western languages or li in Chinese is but a name given to the universal forms of our knowledge. The function of reason is to create concepts and to establish relations among them, and therefore it is a cognitive capacity. To Wang, outside reality seems a shadow of the mind. For instance, the law of causality, which apparently inheres among things and events, is a connection made by the mind. Reason is not an order or law that is immanent in the external world but a form traceable to human consciousness. In analyzing the semantic mutations of li, perhaps the closest Chinese equivalent of "reason," Wang found that in The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhong yang), one of the Confucian classics, li means "close analysis of text and reason." Li refers to a function whereby we define and classify objects, so that things become amenable to our analysis and emerge as relevant out of obscurity. Hence, he argued, li should be treated as a verb designating a subjective act rather than as a noun referring to a pre-given objective property. It is only after the Song dynasty, with the rise of neo-Confucianism, that li was transformed into something resembling an immanent law embedded in things, equal to the Tao of heaven, and thus attained an ontological status. Arguing that the neo-Confucian doctrine of li imputes the shadows of the mind onto the external world and is illusory, Wang averred that reason has only psychological significance and no metaphysical meaning. Understanding the world depends on pre-given forms, which make it possible for us to grasp reality. The only things we can be sure of are the forms of our knowledge, the forms of analysis and classification, which we confer on things so that the world in its bewildering multiplicity may be presented to us in intelligible texture

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and contour (WGTQJ, 5: 1570-96). This is recognizably the Kantian duality between mind and world, the gap between the rational act of the subject and the elusive, unknowable realm of the thing-in-itself" beyond human comprehension. In his radically idealistic moments, Wang would say that outside the relation between mind and matter, nothing exists" (WGTQJ, 5: 1587). Although Wang constantly referred to the notion of the world as mere idea, he nevertheless remained uneasy about the unbridgeable gulf that separates mind from world. If we can rely only on the forms of knowledge to understand the world, we are dealing merely with abstract concepts and their formal interrelations, which seem not to be grounded in solid experiential data. And the more abstract a concept, he cautioned, the more it floats aloof from the world of sense experience. He criticized philosophers such as Hegel who are too much concerned with concepts and treasure them as the stock-in-trade of philosophy without resorting to immediate, intuitive experience. Although "their systems are grand and solemn, they are just mirages and present no solid ground on which to set our feet." Wang's discomfort with Kant sprang mainly from this critical awareness of the Kantian dualism. He was drawn more to Schopenhauer, because Schopenhauer' s arguments bridge or at least narrow the gap between the subjective world and outer reality, and hence are an advance (WGTQJ,5: 1611-12). For Wang, Schopenhauer's most important contribution to philosophy was his theory of intuition. Here Wang anticipated Zhu Guangqian in focusing on intuition as a key element in aesthetics. The theory of intuition attends to abstract concepts as well as sense impressions, supplementing the shadowy mind with tangible experiential data and thus bridging the gap between mind and world. Wang himself wrote an essay on intuition, one of many terms he translated from Western philosophy. In the essay he discussed the shades of meaning of the term as it is translated from Western to Chinese language and took into account both the subjective and the objective aspects of intuition. He accepted the contemporary rendering of intuition'' as zhiguan (literally, "immediate perception") but cautioned that immediate perception is not simply a function of the eye, but is derived from other senses as well, such as hearing and smelling. More important, sense perception is not intuition per se unless the perceptual functions of the sense organs coordinate with the faculties of the mind. This dual attention to the mind and the senses and their interII

II

II

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action prompted Wang to explain intuition in conjunction with the related term "Idea." Recalling the Latin and Greek etymologies of the two terms, he pointed out that both intuition, derived from in and tuitus in Latin, and idea, from Greek, involve sight and looking. Idea can be translated as guannian (perception and mental image) in Chinese, because sense impressions are registered by the five sense organs; hence, guan (look and perceive) is the first morpheme of the Chinese compound. When the things perceived are out of sight but their images remain in our memory, then we have nian (memory, mental image, idea). Thus, guannian consists of perceptions and mental pictures or memory, with immediate perceptions leading to mental images (WGTQJ, 5: 1746). The mental image cannot be the exact duplicate of things. Wang argued that the sense impressions intuited by the subject are neither purely conceptual nor randomly individual or idiosyncratic, but represent a type, which is idea. Idea is the universal form of knowledge, because it points to general truths about the universe and life; it is also particular, because it is still rooted in sense impressions intuited by the subject. Intuitive knowledge partakes of both sense experience and concept, furnishing a firm base of unity between the abstractly conceptual and the randomly particular. The best paradigmatic instance of intuitive knowledge, Wang went on to argue, is fine art. The experience of fine art is unalloyed with concepts and thus is superior to scientific and discursive knowledge. What art represents is neither concepts nor sensory images but something suspended between the two. It is an idea, a knowledge of types, fleshed out in sensory experience and immediately intuitable by the subject. Invoking Schopenhauer's notion of poetry as superior to history, Wang re-enacted the Aristotelian argument that history concerns random individuals and ephemeral events, whereas poetry is able to endow individuals and events with more enduring meaning. The artistic image is the classic example of intuitive knowledge; it encompasses a" cosmos and life," but it does not do so by explicit concepts and linguistic codes. Rather, it reveals itself "in the eyes and hearing of everyone" and can be intuitively grasped everywhere (WGTQJ, 5: 1613). Wang wrote this essay on intuition to discuss the implications of Schopenhauer' s educational philosophy for education in China. In the course of his reflections, aesthetic considerations gradually take precedence over cognitive questions. Wang approached understanding

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and knowledge by a detour through the aesthetic, here exemplified by the intuitive experience. He began by discussing how knowledge can be achieved in education and went on to discover that intuitive understanding is the road to the universal truths of the world. Since nothing can equal art in furnishing an ideal image and structure of intuitive knowledge, the knowledge of art or aesthetic experience becomes a beautiful and reassuring solution to the difficulties we encounter in trying to understand the world and life.

The Crisis of Meaning Intuitive knowledge, in the form of the arts, affords a glimmer of hope that the phenomenal world is knowable. It is reassuring to think that if only we trust our gaze and our guts, the world will readily yield up its secrets and meaning, which can be transparently read off and grasped by us in a single glance. This seems to be Wang Guowei' s one consolation in his search for a solution to the cognitive uncertainty and anxiety of his times. The turn of the twentieth century, from the late Qing dynasty to the early Republican period, was a time of confusion and uncertainty. The traditional social and cultural order was in ruins. The meaning and values that the cultural order upheld were in crisis, and the master narrative exemplified by Confucian doctrines was steadily losing its validity and authority. In otl1er words, the cultural signifying system was no longer tied, in the organic fashion possible in the past, to its field of signifieds. The problem that Wang Guowei faced was thus nothing less than a crisis of meaning. He found himself in a world where it was increasingly difficult to derive meaning from sense impressions received from the world of objects. With the building blocks of the culture in shambles, Wang, like many of his contemporaries, was plunged into deep cognitive anxiety and affective distress. In a well-known essay in memory of his friend, Chen Yinque provided an insight into this crisis of meaning. The definition of Chinese culture has been based on the san gang [the three principles governing relations between emperor and minister, father and son, husband and wife] and liu ji [the six rules governing one's relations with father, brother, clansman, uncle, teacher, and friend] as codified in the Bai hu tong [Discussions in the White Tiger Hall]. These moral principles are the highest of abstract ideals, just like Plato's eidos. According to the principle governing relations between emperor and minister, even if the emperor is as incompetent as

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Sublimation 1111to Death Li Yu [last ruler of the Southern Tang dynasty], his ministers should

still treat him as if he were as capable an emperor as Liu Xiu [of the Latter Han dynasty]; according to the principle governing friendship, even if a man is as ungrateful as Li Ji, his friends should still treat him as if he were as faithful as Bao Shu. Morality, for which many have died, and virtue, for which many have sacrificed, are general and abstract ideals, and they do not specify any particular persons and affairs. 24 When Chen Yinque speaks of cultural and ethical codes as abstract ideals like the Platonic cidos, he is speaking more about his time than the past. The word "abstract," because it is associated with Plato's cidos, may lead one to think that the traditional moral codes are transcendental entities floating aloof from the concrete sociopolitical reality and everyday life. Numerous studies, however, have characterized the cultural-moral codes of traditional China as highly embedded in the empirical realm of sociopolitical structures, the constant tensions between them nohvithstanding. Indeed, the h-vo realms were so integrated as to >varrant the customary designation of the relation as "organismic." It was like a blood relation in which the divine authority was seen as permeating every aspect of daily life and believed to be immanent in mundane everyday human relations 25 The fact that many were ready to die for those "abstract" codes, as Chen mentioned, is proof that the cultural ideals are realizable in the concrete, even in the action and sacrifice of the human body. Chen qualified his assertion of the abstracb1ess of the moral codes when he acknowledged later in the essay that their abstracmess is a result of recent history rather than a mark of their intrinsic nature: "Moral principles are abstract ideals. They must be expressed in something in order to become manifest. That in which the moral principles are embodied and can become manifest is the concrete social institutions, the economic ones being the most important. As long as these institutions remain unchanged, these moral principles too can be preserved."2 6 In a stable and integrated culture, Chen suggested, the ethical codes are embodied and realized in empirical institutions. A symptom of the disintegration of this unity is the "discovery of culture." When we speak of political institutions in traditional China, the category of the political, as Laurence Schneider reminds us, should be understood generically, in the sense that the imperial state not only is the source of political authority but also operates together with ethical and aesthetic norms to sustain order. What we normally call "cultu-

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ral" -the realms of literature, art, and ritual, the system of sacred symbols and texts, and so on- is hardly separable from the political. Late nineteenth century scholars who claimed to have discovered the "national essence" (guocui), however, "saw a special body of native literature and art as a thing-in-itself, independent of and even more fundamental than the political and even social institutions." 27 This newly separated "autonomy" of culture accounts for the irrelevant abstractness of the moral codes that Chen has underscored. The decline of a culture can thus be seen as the breakdown of the symbolic web, the interweaving social text, so to speak, that forms not only the building blocks of a culture but the resources and mental assets whereby an individual puts together a stable self and makes sense of the world. This line of reading is implicit in Chen's essay, which suggests a close relation between culture, its the symbolic system, and the status of the subject. In the several decades since the Daoguang period [1821-50], because of foreign invasions and pressures, our social and economic institutions have been changing rapidly. As a result, the theories of san gang and liu ji have lost their support. They would have become extinct even without aggression from foreign philosophical theories. Even if there exists a man determined to sustain them with his whole heart, his effort will prove futile. China now confronts the greatest calamity and most unprecedented change in its millennia-long history, and our old culture seems to have been brought to an end. When a man is the crystallization of the spirit of this culture, what else can he do except join his culture in a common death? This is the reason why Mr. Wang had to die, and his suicide will be deeply mourned by us and posterity. 28 The rift between the ethico-cultural codes and the institutional, empirical supports, between the supra-sensory ideals and their individual embodiment, parallels the rift between subject and object. The subject who is "raised in his culture" and is its very crystallization finds himself increasingly alienated from a world of objects. The world is no longer recognizable and readable as the manifestation of the cherished presuppositions; rather, it is a chaotic mess teeming with meaningless non-objects. For Wang these objects, stripped of meanings and aura, endlessly multiply themselves under the pressure of Desire. In the attempt to restore lived experience to its original unity, to its aura of intelligibility and emotional wholeness, Wang re-

40

Sublimatio11 ll/lto Deatlz

turned again and again in his scholarly career to the inscribed bones, rites, ceremonies, and political systems of ancient China. While teaching in The Hardoon's Garden, a school run by a British businessman named Hardoon, Wang enthusiastically directed and participated in performances of ancient rites, an activity he regarded as the "most exquisite" aspect of life in the school2q The identity of the individual can be seen as the end result of successful meaning-production. In securing meaning, the individual subject is able to unify past, present, and future and thus assure temporal continuity and correspond to the flow of cultural signs and language. The movement from one sign to another may become habitual and is consequently authorized as "meaning," which is so taken for granted that it becomes reality. When the self-evident bond of sign and meaning breaks down, however, idea and reality begin to diverge. The effect of the "abstract" to which Chen Yinque emphatically referred is precisely this break in the link of meaning-making. The psychic consequence is that the individual finds it impossible to establish a self in the midst of free-floating signs. 30 This abstractness is linked to Wang's theory of abstract desire. For a traditional scholar in the days of the empire's demise, both the supra-sensory realm of culturalethical ideals and empirical reality had been drained of meaning and value. Both of them thus became abstract: the cultural code became "abstract," as free-floating signs strayed further and further from reality; everyday reality had also turned "abstract," in the sense that every object was no more than an object of desire, and every subjective motive sprang from "universal" self-interest. Wang's profound distress stemmed in part from this rift between subject and object. This cognitive distress plagued him throughout his life, as it did many of his contemporaries. Wang turned to Western philosophy primarily in an attempt to find some consolation, his supposedly pure interest in knowledge nohvithstanding. Time and again Wang professed that in philosophy, whether Western or Eastern, whatever could console the mind and dispel doubts was welcome (WGTQJ, 5: 1741). Schopenhauer' s theory of intuition on the model of art offered itself as an attractive solution. But Wang did not dwell on German philosophy for long. By the winter of 1904-S he wrote in an autobiographic sketch that "those philosophical theories that can be loved cannot be believed, and those that can be believed cannot be loved" (vVGTQJ, 5: 1827). Afterward his interest shifted to literature. Critics have attributed this shift to

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Wang's temperament or scholarly preferences. 31 But one thing worthy of attention in Wang's autobiographical statement is that his juxtaposition of an aesthetic criterion, "lovable" (ke ai), with an epistemological standard, "believable" (ke xin), to talk about philosophy. This move is quite consistent with his tendency to aestheticize knowledge. He seems to have turned to literature because in literary texts he could find "more immediate consolation" (WGTQJ, 5: 1827). Presumably philosophical theories, even a down-to-earth theory of intuition, had ceased to console him. This is a logical development from inner contradictions in the theory of intuition, which he had noted in the essay on this topic. The theory of intuition insists that the world of experience is transparently knowable and intuitable as containing universal ideas, without the tortuous labor of conceptual analysis and discursive mediation. But such a theory, which paradoxically claims to do without any theorizing, is itself a language filled with arguments. In comparison, visual and vocal images of art are more "immediate" and experiential and thus better able to qualify as a model for the intuitive mode of knowledge. But to hold up art as a model of knowing is still to "talk" about art, and thus still removed from the rich density of experience. Nothing could be more directly intuitable, therefore, than the immediate appreciation of art itself, because art partakes of both concept and image. This may account for Wang's shift to poetic writing and, more interestingly, for his move from the discursive essay form to the traditional poetic form in the style of random notes (cihua, shihua) in Remarks on Lyrics in the Human World. I argue in the next section that some of the key concepts in Remarks are poetic renderings and ramifications of his cherished theory of intuition, and that he envisioned the book as an imaginary solution to the cognitive distress, this time in intensely poetic terms.

Poetic Apprehension The focus of Remarks mz Lyrics in tlze Human World is the concept of jingjie. James Liu translated this term as "world."32 The "world" is composed of natural objects, scenes, landscapes, and other sense impressions perceived by a poet and turned into images in a poem, but the array of images in the world should be infused with emotions and even ideas of a poet and thus becomes endowed with his subjective colorings and meanings. This may sound banal and commonplace as a statement about the nature of poetry- any introduction to poetry will

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tell us that a poetic image is a fusion of sensory data and emotion. Moreover, the definition of the jingjie is not new, for the same term and definition can be found not only in the Buddhist texts Wang drew on but also in Chinese critical texts on poetry. Many critics before Wang had stressed both emotive content and imagistic texture in poetry. The critical concept that comes closest to jingjie is the terms "feeling" (qing) and "scene" (jing) used by Wang Fuzhi (1619-92) and Wang Shizhen (1634-1711). Jing is the registration of what is perceived in external reality; qing is the expression of what is felt by the poeP 3 One comes from without; the other from within. Wang's jingjie holds interest for us, however, in the ways he elaborates this concept in conjunction with other related terms and the ways his poetic theory is articulated with intuitive understanding. In his discussion Wang constantly overlapped qing and jing, emotive content and imagistic form. The "world," he wrote, does not refer to scenes and objects alone. Emotional states like joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness can also become worlds in their own right. In a note, he cites a poem by Li Bai of the Tang dynasty lamenting the transience of life whose lines are barren of concrete images. Wang suggested that subjective states can be directly expressed and do not need imagistic equivalents to become a "world." 34 When the subjective, emotive content becomes ascendant over the sensory density of images, a poem evokes a "world with a self" (you wo zhi jing, p. 349). In such a world, the poet looks at things from his or her perspective, and the things in it become tinged with the poet's subjective attributes. A related term that Wang uses to describe this projection of the poet's self in a world is zaojing (Lunzlw Ji, p. 348), the created or constructed state. The created state contrasts with the descriptive state (xiejing), which merely transcribes and registers perceptible reality. This contrast is further enforced by the distinction between idealistic and realistic writers. With this stress on the poet's self as the major source that informs and constitutes the "world," Wang came to see descriptive images of external objects in poetry as disguised emotive utterances serving a performative function: "Critics in the past distinguished behveen the language of scene and that of emotion. As a matter of fact, all the words descriptive of external scenes are also the words expressive of emotion" (Lunzlzu ji, p. 385). At one point he inflated the profile of the poet's self to such an extent that he claimed the poet is able to enslave external objects at will (Lwzzlzu ;i, p. 367). The world with a self recalls the transcendental subject of knowl-

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edge discussed above. This subject, equipped with the a priori forms of knowledge and perception, identifies and endows objects with outlines and shapes. As we have seen, in his discussion of Kant and Schopenhauer, Wang expressed uneasiness about this notion of the world as the mere projection of the self. In the Remarks, he developed a poetical description that purports to discriminate poetic qualities but also allows him to bring this high-flown, somewhat abstract subjectivity down to a more solid ground. In addition to the world with a self, Wang posited the "world without a self" (wu wo zhi jing). In this world, the poet is able to relinquish personal and subjective lenses and "looks at things from the perspective of things themselves" (Lunzhu ji, p. 349). The poet becomes merged with things and can no longer tell the world from the self. In great poets," the created state and the descriptive state are difficult to separate. The created state must accord with nature, whereas described scenes should also approach the ideal" (Lunzhu ji, p. 348). Nature as such, however, is not so malleable to the ideal. To Wang, nature as purely random impressions or things in themselves was anything but material for the poetical world: "Objects in nature are related to each other in mutual restriction and constraints. But when written into literature or art, whatever is restrictive in objects should be excluded" (Lunzhu ji, p. 349). Wang's uneasiness with the material, restrictive aspect of nature is evident. To him, external, material objects are slaves to desire and utility. This aspect of nature is too limiting to the human spirit and poetic imagination. What kind of nature, then, can be written into poetry? "A created world, however fictive, must draw its materials from nature, and its structure must also conform to the laws of nature" (Lunzlw ji, p. 349). By assuming certain lawful regularities in nature, Wang displaced the a priori forms of knowledge, which seem too far removed from sensory experience, onto more "solid" ground. In this way, the mind, whether poetic or intuitive, has something out there to correspond to. If there is in nature something responsive and answerable to the projection of the mind, there will be a possibility of harmonious identity between mind and world. In this light, a number of blatantly paradoxical statements by Wang seem less paradoxical: "The world created by great poets always conforms to nature, and the world described by them also approaches the ideal." "A realistic writer is an idealistic writer. ...The idealistic writer is also a realistic writer" (Lunzhu ji, pp. 348-49).

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More important, it is the quickness and ease with which the mind corresponds to such an answerable world that is envisaged and depicted in poetic imagery. The mind of a great poet can move in and out of things with ease: "The poet must be able equally to enter into and out of the universe and life. Inside of things he can describe; outside he can contemplate. Inside he is filled with vitality; outside he will have high taste" (Lunzhu ji, p. 367). Thus the poetical world is no longer divided betw·een one with a self and the other without a self. The poet not only can treat things as slaves, but also can tenderly care for them, so that he can be happy and sad in the company of flowers and birds (Lunzhu ji, p. 367). In this seamless union between the poet and things, the poetic world is transfigured into a mood. Things seem to have become spiritualized entities, which appear ineffable, illusive, and mysterious but still fraught with meaning. The poetic world suffused with mood and spirit is likened to "sound in the air, color in appearances, the moon in water, or images in a mirror. The words pale before images: images are limited but the meanings they suggest are inexhaustible and boundless" (Lunzhi ji, p. 350). Just as intuitive knowledge allows us to zoom in on the essence of things without detouring through analytical concepts, so the poetic world thrusts us face to face with images that speak immediately and transparently to us. The difference between mind and world, subject and object, disappears, and we see in the world our own reflection as in a mirror, our own self-images reflected back to us. How lucky we would be if we could step out of the poetic world and apprehend the real world with the same quickness and transparency that allows us to grasp in a single intuition the poetic world or jingjie. Wang pushed this parallel between poetry and knowledge further when he describes the overlap of intuitive understanding and poetic apprehension. In a celebrated passage, he depicted, with three poetic lines quoted from three poets, how a great scholar (not a poet), makes a great achievement in search of knowledge. The great scholar has to pass through three stages. The first is a desolate autumn vista that the scholar surveys from a high tower, which opens onto endless horizons, a vista suggesting the disconcerting infinity of knowledge as well as his melancholy when confronting the endless phenomenal expanse. The second stage is the painful pursuit of knowledge. But the effort does not pay off until he reaches the third stage: a moment of enlightenment:

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I sought her in the crowd a hundred, a thousand, times. Suddenly with a turn of the head, I had a glimpse of her where the lamplight was fading into the night. (Lunzhuji, p. 355) The moment is one of sudden illumination. After a long, laborious search, it comes with a flash- with a sudden turn of the head and the swiftness of a glance. This is a magic moment beyond rational explanation, a moment further mystified into an endowment of a poet's mind. There are two kinds of world, Wang wrote, that of the poet and that of an ordinary person. But the fine scenes of nature seem especially "designed for the poet" (Lunzhu ji, p. 393). Only the poet can comprehend this moment and shape it into language, just as only the Schopenhauerian superman is capable of intuitively knowing the essence of things. This is an apt image for visualizing how intuitive understanding works. Indeed in Rei/larks on Lyrics in the Human World, Wang Guowei created a cluster of images and scenarios that serve as a poetic illustration of the intuitive mode of knowing and provided a comforting vision for the possible reconciliation of mind with world. The whole undertaking, for all its celebrated value in literary criticism, is in a sense an imaginary solution to real historical problems-the crisis of meaning and understanding-that plagued Wang and many of his contemporaries.

The Sublime and Death For Wang Guowei, the "world," with its seamless union of emotion and scene, of mind and world, belonged to the order of the beautiful. With this in mind, we are now in a better position to understand his elaboration of the beautiful and the sublime in his "Critique of the Dream of the Red Chamber." In contemplating things of beauty, the aesthetic subject is able to suspend relations of interest with the object and shed desire, fear, and hope. He or she becomes a pure will-less subject or, in Ralph W. Emerson's words, a "transparent eyeball" engaged in a free perception of the form of the object. This subjectposition would be effective in delivering us from the unpleasant entanglements of worldly interests and desires. Not that sensory impressions and delight should be barred from this contemplative enclosure-a harmonious interplay between sense and intellect is still

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necessary for the aesthetic subject, who should be able to play with "pure" images such as flowers, birds, and things. The sublime is a different story. The sublime, to be sure, also functions to deliver us from desire but with a sudden violence and an absolute denial of the sensuous. In the experience of the sublime, the object is extremely hostile to us, our will to live is broken and dissolved, and our power of knowledge asserts its absolute independence (WGTQJ, 5: 1628-71 ). Although Wang borrowed his description of the sublime from Kant and Schopenhauer, his underlying concerns differed from theirs. Rather than assert the unifying power of reason over the imagination, Wang invoked the sublime to elaborate how best to be rid of desire. For him, the Dream of the Red Chamber is the supreme example of the sublime in Chinese literature. It addresses the denial of the will to life and runs counter to traditional Chinese aesthetics, which he denigrates as clinging too much to the facile happiness of worldly life. In the Critique, Wang chose a passage from the novel to illustrate the literary quality of the sublime but made only a minimal comment. Although many critics have discussed this passage, it still remains enigmatic and needs more elaboration. The passage in question is a poignant episode depicting Lin Daiyu' s confused reaction to the news that a marriage has been arranged between her beloved Jia Baoyu and her rival Xue Baochai. Without quoting the long passage, I first present and then consider selectively some moments and elements that are relevant to the analysis of the sublime. Lin Daiyu and Jia Baoyu' s passion is almost a matter of life and death for the young lovers. Not knowing this, a maid unwittingly reveals to Lin the secret marriage arrangement, made by the family elders, between Jia Baoyu and Xue Baochai. Immediately, a series of descriptions indicate the breakdown of normal consciousness in Lin Daiyu. The words "struck Daiyu' s ears like a clap of thunder," and she was "speechless with horror." As the maid babbles away about her own maltreatment at the hands of the older maids for gossiping about the secret-a comic heightening of the tragic import of the scene- Lin Daiyu' s psychic distress turns into physically crippling effects. She is on the verge of collapse. "Her body felt as though it weighed a hundred tons, her feet were as wobbly as if she were walking on cotton-floss. She could only manage one step at a time." In her giddiness, she wanders aimlessly in circles and is lost in utter confusion. Guided by her maid, she meets Baoyu. The two lovers simply

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"sat there staring into each other's faces and smiling like a pair of halfwits." After exchanging a few senseless words with Baoyu, she is suddenly able to hurry home at twice her normal speed, unassisted by her maids, but she walks in a wrong direction. As soon as she arrives at her chambers with the help of the maids, she "stumbles forwards onto the ground, and gives a loud cry. A stream of blood comes gushing from her mouth."3 5 A close reading of the passage, rather than such a summary presentation, would impress the reader with the traumatic shock, the breakdown of consciousness, the crippling of bodily functions, the agonizing suffering and pain, and the intimation of impending death. All these elements seem foreign to the aesthetic pleasure of the presumed self-empowerment to be expected from a sublime scene. But on Wang Guowei's reckoning, this episode is sublime by virtue of being tragic. The scenario is tragic in its power to produce a cathartic effect on readers, so that their spirit is uplifted and purified. The tragic pleasure, which is also a sublime sensation, is the pleasure we derive from the contemplation of suffering and pain. Wang quoted Goethe to clinch this Aristotelian proposition: "What in life doth only grieve us/ That in art we gladly see" (WGTQJ, 5: 1635). How is it possible that in contemplating the mental and physical suffering of Lin Daiyu and of many other characters in the Dream, we as readers can experience the pleasure of the sublime? By asserting the connection between the sublime pleasure and suffering, Wang was evidently engaging a familiar motif about the relation of aesthetics and death in the Western tradition. This motif found a compelling expression in Schopenhauer and was given a psychoanalytical explanation by Freud. To substantiate this motif, it might be of some help to make a brief excursion into Freud's meta-psychological explanation. The reason for invoking Freud here is twofold. first, the explanation given by Freud of the masochistic mechanism of deriving pleasure from pain is a psychoanalytical elaboration of Schopenhauer' s theory. Second, Freud's theory of traumatic shock has a direct bearing on the question of the sublime and death, which is crucial to Wang's theory of the sublime. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud discussed a mental condition called "traumatic neurosis" and provided a historical context for the illness- a socio-historical milieu similar to the distressing and traumatic times in which Wang Guowei lived. Freud identified traumatic neurosis as a mental condition that occurs after railway disas-

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ters and other accidents involving death and injury. World War I, which had just ended, "gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind."V> Freud's description of traumatic neurosis reads like a psychoanalytical translation of the Kantian scenario of the sublime. In apprehending the world, the Kantian subject must rely on the a priori forms of understanding. The psychic equivalent of these forms is what Freud calls the System Perception-Consciousness, which constitutes a "protective shield" in the psychical apparatus. In order to maintain psychical health and stability, this protective shield allows only an appropriate amount of excitation from outside. When an overload of stimuli from the external environment occurs, when any outside excitation is powerful enough to break through the protective shield, the psychical apparatus will be thrown into a condition that can be described as "traumatic." In the traumatic situation, "There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with a large amount of stimulus." Hence, the common traumatic neurosis is "a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli."37 At this moment, the urgent problem for the subject is to master and control the intruding stimuli in order to sustain psychic stability. To illustrate this, Freud used a game played by his grandson to cope with the distressing absence of his mother. By making a reel disappear and re-appear repeatedly, the child tried to master the painful situation, accompanying each moment alternately with the German words fort (gone) and da (there). Initially the child was in a passive situation: he was overpowered by the experience of being separated from his mother. But by repeating the painful experience in the game, the child "took on an active part." Freud was led by this interpretation to speculate further on a deeper impulse inherent in the psychical structure, the impulse "to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it." Freud designated this deeper impulse the death drive." 3R One of the reasons that compelled Freud to speculate on a deeper impulse was the abundant evidence of this mental tendency in literature and art. The impulse to master a painful experience by repeating it is found in the psychology of tragedy. Tragedies, Freud wrote, do not spare the spectators the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable." It seems that there are means in tragedies of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be 11

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recollected and worked over in the mind. Although Freud in his analysis attempted to attribute the pleasure-in-pain complex to masochism, he also suggested that inquiries into such cases "should be undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject matter."39 Such a system of aesthetics can be found in Kant's analysis of the two types of the sublime. In the mathematical sublime, the imagination is strained and exhausted to the breaking point by the flooding of external sensory stimuli. In a self-defensive reaction, the subject effects a transcendent leap toward the higher order of reason- an operation capable of binding the excessive stimuli into a single intuition- and satisfies reason's need for totality in the face of bewildering infinity. 40 In the dynamic sublime, on the other hand, the overpowered subject tries to assert its mastery over the crushing external threats by what Kant calls "subreption" -identifying with the magnificent power outside and making it one's own.41 Whether reason's ruse in reasserting itself or the mind's subreption of power, these mental processes are psychical mechanisms for sustaining the stable self. The achievement of self-control, if effective, is accompanied by the aesthetic pleasure of the sublime. Aware of the precarious character of human consciousness itself, Freud would not have given as much credit to the power of reason. Freud sought the roots of the defense mechanism in the primeval stratum of human nature. In moving in this direction, Freud was abandoning rigorous psychical analysis for metaphysical speculations in the vein of Schopenhauer. He observed that controlling the force of the outside excitation that "streams into the psychical apparatus consists in its change from a freely flowing into a quiescent state." 42 The change is motivated by a deep instinct called the" death instinct." The death instinct is the tendency in all living substance to return to "the quiescence of the inorganic world." The pleasure principle, according to Freud, only serves the death instinct, whose business is to "free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation or to keep the amount of excitation constant." It is particularly interesting to note that Freud's phrase for the death instinct, the "Nirvana principle," resonates with the Buddhist dimension of Wang's aesthetics. Moreover, Freud called this inner ceaseless drive toward death the" sublime" necessity. 43 Freud's psychoanalytical vocabulary for the sublime experience may help us understand Wang's analysis of that experience. In Wang's writing, the sublime seems to be an allegorical figure capable

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of addressing the complex question of the individual caught in the emergency of history. It addresses the individual's ability to maintain a self, a psychic capacity to ward off life-crushing forces. It offers a possibility of living with drastic and bewildering cultural changes, the possibility of surviving historical traumas. Wang sought to find in the aesthetic of the sublime some exit out of the trauma, and it is instructive to look at the aesthetic elaboration by which Wang tried to think away his own and his culture's distress. This entails an analysis of the relation among the subject, the sublime, and death. In Wang's analysis of the Dream, the tragic is inherent in daily life. Driven by desire, humans become embroiled in perpetual suffering and tension. In this sense life itself is a tragedy. Tragedy does not arise from some unexpected misfortune or fate, nor is it caused by demonically wicked characters. It is inescapable. There are ways out of this tragic cauldron of desire other than art and literature, but art is certainly the most effective means of emancipation. The beautiful in art suspends our desire and makes us forget our interested relation to objects. The sublime in tragic art works more effectively and forcefully. The passage from the Drea111 suggests that the tragic is carried to a deeply traumatic extreme. It destroys desire, but in reaction we gain an understanding: we come to a "true" knowledge of the futile struggle of our life, which is always bound up with pain and suffering, and our spirit is uplifted to an otherworldly realm. The sublime, as exemplified in the Dream, is thus an aesthetic moment in which we as desire-driven creatures arc violently andrelentlessly thrust forward toward a transcendent realm of emancipation. This is a transcendence beyond the empirical self ridden with everyday cares and desires- a process of sublimation. 44 This process is envisioned in the images of self-immolation, self-inflicted tortures, purgatorial sufferings, and dying, a set of disparate images that Wang drew from Buddhist and Western texts. To seek emancipation, said Wang, one needs to treat life as a crucible and sufferings as charcoal, so that one can cast the "tripod of emancipation" (VVGIQJ, 5: 1643). The images by which the sublime subject projects his or her destiny point toward a realm of void and death. Withdrawing from the suffering of life, Wang wrote, we seek to enter into a "realm devoid of life" (m~ I(J/, 5:1641 ). The picture of the subject in this realm is radically different from the complete, all-around individual that Wang thought a good education can nurture. In an essay on education, Wang wrote that the in-

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dividual in the everyday world has a body and a mind. The mind is subdivided into the functions of knowledge, emotion, and desire. Whereas intellectual and ethical educations cultivate socially useful knowledge and proper behavior, only aesthetic education can harmonize the three faculties of the mind and build the complete and socially useful personality. Wang obviously had Schiller's aesthetic program in mind when he made these remarks. His educational proposal makes one think of the process of Bildung-the aesthetic self-cultivation of desire-driven individuals into subjects capable of meeting the varied demands of a rationally organized society (WGTQJ, 5: 1767-70). As we saw above, the educational process of Bildzmg was high on the agenda of the early advocates of aesthetic activity. Cai Yuanpei, for example, believed that the popularization of good taste in the beautiful through aesthetic education was the key to nurturing the completely formed personality in the citizens of a new nation. In the trajectory of the sublime, however, this ideal subjectwhich is already a projected goal of cultural sublimation-has to be left behind. The subject is to be severed from all its practical ties with the social, the sensory, and the corporeal and purged of its desire and emotion. The three mental faculties whose harmony is said to constitute an ideal subject are reduced to one. The subject of the sublime is now a pure, will-less, naked intellect. It contemplates nothing other than itself- a will-less subject of knowledge. The most striking image Wang used to describe this state of the subject is that of Nirvana: When the emancipated subject attains its goal," although its body still exists, it is actually like a piece of dried-out wood, and its heart is like extinguished ashes" (WGTQJ, 5: 1641). The will-less subject of knowledge is not the familiar visionary of Western mysticism or romanticism who engages in contemplation in order to catch the "truth" emanating from a divine being. Rather than seek a metaphysical truth that makes the world intelligible to the mind, the will-less subject rejects the world as illusory and delights in the sheer pleasure of mental equilibrium. Wang repeatedly said that in the experience of the sublime we attain to a state of pure knowledge. This knowledge refers not to the possession of facts and the understanding of doctrines, but to the ability of the aesthetic subject to play around with mere appearances, to appreciate aesthetic forms, and to delight in the absence of excitement. The world out there is nothing, and the subject is safe and secure in a complete mental invulnerability. Wang asserted that in aesthetic contemplation we do not

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ask whether the world exists or not, so long as we enjoy peace and tranquillity (we!(!], 5: 1656). If true to itself, the world of nothingness cannot be presented in tangible images and words. But like the Kantian sublime, the unrepresentable can be figured through negative representations that flee from our received structures of meaning. Wang drew a well-known image from a song in the Dream of the Red Chamber about "the landscape desolate and bare": The disillusioned to their convents fly, the still deluded miserably die. Like birds who, having fed, to the woods repair, They leave the landscape desolate and bare.45 For reasons of prosody, the English translation of the last line (bai mangmang de dadi zlzen gmrjing) lacks the barrenness and desolation present in the original syntax and tone. A more literal translation would be something like "a white barren land, a clean void." This familiar Daoist image epitomizes the state of emancipation, a total escape from the world and a. cessation of life. In other words, the scene of emancipation is the scene of death. As a mirror reflection of the scene of emptiness, the aesthetic subject is seen as the death of the subject. Wang was evidently working parallel to Schopenhauer and Freud when he installed the aesthetic subject in the state of Nirvana- a state with a zero degree of psychic tension and excitation. This is obvious when he came to the question of suicide. In addition to the contemplation of torture and pain, he wrote, suicide is also a means for achieving the aesthetic condition. Using the suicides of two groups of characters in the Dream, Wang distinguished the false from the truly liberating suicide. Those who commit suicide in the hopes of gratifying their desires in some imagined future world are not emancipated in any real sense, for their desires still remain alive. On the other hand, one who is able to will himself into a state where the body is like" dried-out wood" and the heart like" extinguished ashes" has achieved the purpose of suicide (WGTQJ, 5: 1641-42). The goal of fine art is therefore promoting the aesthetic condition of death through a form of symbolic suicide. Fine art aims at the death of the subject. Art works like a kind of medicine to strengthen the weak. Hence, it is of no use to a subject who has already attained a voluntary state of death. "If there is a man who from time immemorial has had no life and death, no pain and pleasure,

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knows no worldly entanglements but only eternal knowledge, then art, which we treasure highly, would be for him but the noisy buzzing of insects" (WGTQJ, 5: 1657). Wang Guowei's notion about the relation of the sublime and death can be seen as an asceticism of the mind that reflects his personal nature, but it also has strong social and historical resonances. He lived in an age when the Western invasions and the breakdown of traditional culture threatened every sensitive mind with an overload of confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty. In this bleak time, the aesthetic seemed able to offer, in Freudian terms, a welcome possibility of lessening the psychic impact of this threat and of achieving some form of personal mastery over a bewildering, hostile world. Wang spoke of the traumatic tenor of his times as characterized by three madnesses of popular movements, of appetitive desire, and of suicide (WCFQJ, 5: 1901). The aesthetic seemed to offer some hope of rescue and salvation. The beautiful may be compared to a frontline defense mechanism against the onslaught of madness, converting chaos into a fiction of unity and harmony. The poetic world of jingjie is the ultimate emblem of this order of the beautiful. In the sublime, however, the hostile forces seem to have torn apart the veil of the beautiful and broken through the first line of protection; a last-ditch defense is desperately needed to save the subject. The sublime allows the subject "to contemplate hostile objects with absolute equanimity, serene in the knowledge that they can no longer harm us." 46 But absolute equanimity is possible only in the death of the subject. So the last defense of the subject is to kill himself imaginatively before the hostile forces catch him. Wang conceived of this aesthetic death as a means of fortifying the subject. The subject, in the self-willed, sublime death condition, does not need a dose of strengthening through the aesthetic, because he is already strong, which means he is as invulnerable as death (fVGTQJ, 5: 1685). I do not wish to add another explanation to the numerous theories about Wang Guowei's suicide. Wang's aesthetic of the sublime indicates tl1e dilemma of following the trajectory of the aesthetic. On the one hand, the aesthetic seems to offer a critique of appetitive, egoistic desire and promises a way of constructing a fuller, richer subjectivity suitable for a new nation. But by pushing from the beautiful to the sublime, Wang is caught in the paradox that the truly free and unitary subject is dead. The subject comes into being by watching itself die

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and derives a sublime pleasure in its self-destruction. Wang Guowei's meditation on the aesthetic begins with large social and political concerns, and his scenarios of the sublime poignantly reveal the feeble power of the aesthetic in combating the overwhelming onslaught of history.

2 Writing China: The Imaginary Body and Allegorical Wilderness ... contracted a clzill while singing and roistering; saw an abyss in heaven. In all eyes saw notlri ng; in hopelessness found salvation. -LuXun

One of the cruel ironies that modern history has visited on China is the emergence of the study of aesthetics. Modern aesthetics is often taken to be about art, beauty, taste, and grace and conjures up the image of the eighteenth-century English gentleman in his cultured leisure or scenes of witty conversations in the French salons. Yet this discourse of the emerging eighteenth-century bourgeoisie was seized on by Chinese thinkers and writers at the turn of this century, after the ancient empire had suffered repeated humiliations by the Western powers. I It is true that we can talk about a Chinese aesthetic tradition in the pre-modern dynasties, but the notion would refer to latent, unspoken assumptions and motifs inferable from critical comments and the actual practices of art and literature. As a self-conscious cultural pursuit, aesthetics emerged in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As an intellectual inquiry and a mode of thinking, feeling, and representation distinct from other orders of discourse, aesthetics is indeed a matter of China's encounter with the West. Despite attempts to see modern Chinese aesthetic thought as a scholarly pursuit pertaining to the arts, literature, or literary criticism, historians of Chinese aesthetics are often inclined to see the growing interest in aesthetics at the turn of the century as an attempt at self-strengthening and self-defense. Aesthetics was seen, along with Western tech-

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nology, science, and social theories, as one of the practical solutions for China's problems 2 Liang Qichao and Cai Yuanpei, in their attempts to revitalize the spirit of the Chinese demoralized by the imperialist invasions and the decline of traditional culture, were visionaries in an aesthetic vein. Both are famous for assigning a high value to literature and art in forging the new subjectivity of a new people 3 More strictly aesthetic than these two public-minded thinkers was Wang Guowei. As noted in the preceding chapter, Wang borrowed and revised German aesthetics in a painful attempt to sort out and alleviate the urgent problems of his times. For him the aesthetic- aesthetic experience and education- had the potential to regenerate a demoralized people 4 In working out the theory of zlwangnzei (strong and muscular beauty), Wang reinterpreted the notion of the sublime advanced by Kant and Schopenhauer. His skillful blending of Western ideas and the Chinese tradition furnished terms that gave a new vigor and meaning to the Confucian vocabulary of moral integrity and the Buddhist description of the invulnerable mind in a state of Nirvana. In his analysis of the sublime, Wang also demonstrated a strong social concern. He proposed to his audience that they fortify their minds through the contemplation of the sublime forces in nature and in tragic art, in order to become impervious to and undaunted by the painful onslaught of sensory influxes. The external sensory influx, unleashed by the frequent social and cultural upheavals and historical ruptures spanning generations, was indeed crushing. The aesthetic of the sublime was intended to nurture a tough mind and to fortify the psyche. In the experience of the sublime, the soft-minded, opium-enfeebled, bewildered Chinese would undergo a rigorous training in the boot camp of trauma and pain, only to emerge ready and seasoned to withstand threats and death with utter equanimity. This rather stoic profile of the subject experiencing the rigors of the sublime may conceal a grim political unconscious. It may well have been a sophisticated defensive strategy, dealing in the grandiose and the picturesque for sorely needed ideological as well psychic reassurance. 5 Another major aesthetic thinker is Lu Xun, who is often given an important place in contemporary Chinese aesthetic discourse. Deeply influenced by Wang Guowei, Lu Xun also sought ways to regenerate the Chinese people and nation. He went about this not by propagating well-formulated ideas or theories but by writing literature. Whereas Wang Guowei dwelled on the possibility of strengthening the mind of

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the people, Lu Xun envisioned and wrote about a body that would be strong enough to overcome external threats. In his zeal to fortify the Chinese mind, Wang Guowei regarded the body as a problem and saw it as a cauldron of desire and appetite. By contrast, Lu Xun perceived in the body a hidden reservoir of creative energy and regenerative force. The energy and force, he suggested in his long essay "On the Power of Mara Poetry" and other early essays, had been suffocated by the centuries-old tradition; yet it could be retrieved to fashion a healthy and powerful individual for the program of strengthening the nation. Lu Xun was not alone in fondly contemplating the strong body. In the decades following the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) and accompanying the rise of the aesthetic in intellectual circles was what can be called a "discovery of the body" among Chinese advocates of reform. Liang Qichao and Yan Fu (1854-1921) were two of the eminent voices calling for strengthening the body. In his article "On Power" ("Yuan qiang") published in 1895, Yan Fu advocated strengthening the "people's power," a term Yan conceived in a physical and bodily dimension. Yan was so enthusiastic about this power that he translated Herbert Spencer's term "physical education" into "physical or bodily strength" (ti li) and emphasized bodily strength to such an extent that it became for him as valuable as the intellectual and moral development of a new people. In his well-known On New People (Xinmin shuo), Liang Qichao envisioned a new image for the Chinese people. Among several qualities requisite to the formation of the new collective subject, Liang emphasized the corporeal-psychic qualities, such as perseverance, ambition, adventurousness, and militancyqualities that Western cultures possessed and the Chinese race lacked. He upheld the corporeal-psychic power of the militant body by criticizing the traditional culture. By maintaining the idea of universal harmony and advocating a sedate way of life, Confucianism and Daoism, Liang charged, had succeeded in sapping the physical energy and force of the Chinese. The statements of these early reformers on the body show that what they envisioned was not merely a body with certain physiological attributes but one that possessed such culturally valuable qualities as health, strength, vigor, and vitality. It was also a body to be conditioned by a rigorous physical and military training, so that it was ready for aggressive combat and in good shape to embark on adventures or enterprises 6 Health, strength, vigor, and courage were qualities badly needed

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to revitalize the sick body writ large, the humiliating image of the collective body of the Chinese race as the "sick man of East Asia" (Dongya bingfu)? In the Sino-Japanese War, China was defeated by its small neighbor Japan. As the last in a series of defeats and humiliations since the Opium War, the fiasco destroyed any lingering confidence in the superiority of the Central Kingdom. For many, the defeat was the final rude awakening from the complacent view of China as a "sleeping lion" to the painful reality of China as a "dead lion." 8 The immediate response was the attempt to emulate the West for selfempowerment. This project of self-strengthening was carried out in two directions. First, the government endorsed a large-scale campaign to import military technology from the West and introduce modern military training. From this sprang an enormous enthusiasm for physical education, which was part of the "national education for military purpose" advocated by Yan Fu. Yan Fu put physical education on the same footing with the improvement of people's mind and morality, and physical education gained an unquestioned and newly privileged position on a par with intellectual and moral education. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first published essay of Mao Zedong, the man who later became perhaps the most important individual in twentieth-century China, was also on physical education. In the essay "i\ Study of Physical Culture" ("Tiyu zhi yanjiu") published in New Youtlz (Xin qingnian) in April 1917, Mao Zedong extolled bodily strength as the precondition for developing the other aspects of an allaround individuaJ.9 This discourse on the body should not obscure its psychic dimension. The need for corporeal-psychic strength was motivated by the political goal of regenerating the physique of a sick people and constructing a robust form of subjectivity. This discourse was bound up with concerns and issues that are better characterized as aesthetic. It delivered its arguments and produced its evidence through aesthetic representation and locutions. The link between the corporeal and psychical is a strong motif in Western aesthetics. Writers on aesthetics, such as Eagleton and Heidegger, have claimed that the aesthetic arises as a discourse on the body 10 Heidegger identified the connections between the aesthetic and the bodily as the essence of modern aesthetics deriving from Nietzsche. With the growing reification and impoverishment of human existence in the modern industrial world, the aesthetic, Heidegger argued, emerges as a "rescue of 'life,'" a countermovement to the atrophy of lived experience. Modern aesthetics is

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said to be a return to a romantic version of the authentic bodily experience. "That suggests that states of feeling, taken to be purely psychical, are to be traced to the bodily condition proper to them. Seen as a whole, it is precisely the unbroken and indissoluble unity of the corporeal-psychical, the living, that is posited as the realm of the aesthetic state: the living 'nature' of man." 11 Such aesthetics carries a culturally regenerative power: its mission is to erect new standards, posit new values, and establish new meaning in a spiritually depleted world. In the Chinese context, the discourse on the physical body was an aid to envisioning something beyond the body. It was a metaphor, a vast concern for the "bodily" as well as spiritual health and vitality of a culture. In their culturally driven notion of the aesthetic, thinkers at the turn of the century saw in this Western discourse heartening possibilities for rebuilding Chinese culture as it teetered on the brink of the abyss. In an interesting study, the Chinese scholar Guo Guocan claims that from the turn of the century to the aftermath of the May Fourth movement, intellectuals, chief among them Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Lu Xun, and Guo Moruo (1892-1978), created a continuous and formidable intellectual current that upheld the beauty of power. This power is of every color: it is military, populist, bodily, poetic, emotional, imaginative, regenerative-a virtual life force that could give strength and vitality to a declining culture.1 2 Lu Xun's essay "On the Imbalance of Culture" ("Wenhua pianzhi lun") is a good example of the similarity and difference between Western and Chinese conceptions of the aesthetic body. In the West, industrialization and modernization met with a strong romantic rebellion calling for the aesthetic reaffirmation of imagination, sentiment, and the integrity of the individual's lived experience. In the Chinese situation, the bodily and mental weaknesses of the Chinese people were the shadows behind Lu Xun's appreciation of the superhuman figure endowed with a strong will. Yet the terms and notions that Lu Xun used in this essay are aesthetic in the broadly cultural sense.l 3 In this chapter, I first examine the ways in which the discourse on the body passed into the realm of the aesthetic. It is my contention that the formation of this politically motivated discourse constantly made use of arguments and images that belong to a different discursive context, be it literary criticism, poetic idioms, or simply a consistent matrix of metaphors and images. This point of inquiry finds in Lu Xun a compelling example. As the foremost writer in modern China, Lu Xun joined in the discursive and poetic fervor about the strong body

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of the Chinese and went much further than anyone else in writing and imagining the body of power in aesthetic terms. He celebrated with poetic intensity the gigantic body on the models of the Nietzschean superman and the romantic poet. He was able to do this by employing a symbolic language fraught with bodily and natural images derived from a May Fourth understanding of language as a transparent medium of society and culture as a living organism. I then attempt to analyze how Lu Xun's understanding of language underwent a drastic twist in the writing of Wild Grass, a collection of prose poems more marveled at than studied. In these pieces Lu Xun evolved a form of writing that undercuts symbolic language. As a further elaboration of Fredric Jameson's view on the allegorical in Lu Xun, I trace this change to Walter Benjamin's conception of allegory, which challenges the symbolic transparency of signs in Hegel and characterizes the estranged consciousness of the alienated individual in modern times. I then turn to the allegorical character of Lu Xun's prose poems. As a richly articulated concept, allegory may allow us to discern a number of literary motifs and aesthetic views concerning representation, history, and self. These find exquisite expression in Eileen Chang's work. Chang's aesthetic principle of "the desolate," an aesthetic of melancholy with an eye to the singular, the detail, and the ruin, is a crystallization of a somber allegory of scarred modern Chinese history. Off-centered and subversive of the totalizing representation of the subject and history, these motifs will be explored by the >vriters who again seized on the "negative" brand of the aesthetic as a means to effect cultural change in post-Mao China. One cannot find a better place to examine the aestheticization of the power of the body than Lu Xun' s essay" On the Power of Mara Poetry." In this long and passionate essay, Lu Xun glorified the demonic power and vital energy seething in the bodies of the romantic poets and capable of invigorating other bodies. This essay is important in examining the ways in which politics is fleshed out in the aesthetic. It enjoys a privileged position in the contemporary Chinese discourse of the sublime, or c/wnggao. Li Zehou has contributed considerably to this discourse of the sublime, and I devote Chapter 4 to his analysis. Li refers repeatedly to Lu Xun' s essay as a specimen of the sublime style. In his analysis of the classical concept of wind and bone, which denotes a vigorous style of poetry akin to the Longinian grand style, Li traces the concept to a strand of Chinese aesthetics that associates beauty with power. Following the logic of "Le style, c'est l'homme

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meme," Li regards the Lu Xun of the Mara essay as the modern avatar of this tradition. 14 Lu Xun's essay lends itself to many uses in the discourse of chonggao. Not only his celebration of the power of the body buttressed by moral integrity but also his physiognomy are taken to be expressive of defiance and perseverance. Lu Xun's spirit and style have made him a favorite candidate for the subhme revolutionary hero. 15 By reading this essay, we may see how the tendency to aestheticize power is articulated and how Lu Xun's notions are susceptible of appropriation in the later discursive formation of the sublime.

Extolling the Body of Power In the preface to an essay collection that included a reprint of "On the Power of Mara Poetry," Lu Xun expressed a sense of estrangement toward the essay, speaking of it as an arbitrary hodgepodge of classical words and outdated syntactical struchues.l 6 But beneath the disorderly surface of the essay, we can still find something remarkably coherent and persistent, namely, a unified emotional pitch. It is hard not to be struck by its exuberant exultation of power. The title itself is quite significant: it signals a close affinity between poetry and power. Mnra is the Hindu god of destruction, and in the essay the word designates cultural rebels like Satan and Prometheus and the romantic poets such as Byron and Shelley. The power of such a "satanic" school of poetry is said to be able to provoke the people out of lethargy and silence into heroic action. But such power does not belong only to the satanic school of poetry. Lu Xun also associated poetry with changes in a culture's vitality. Good poetry is associated with powerful and magnificent cultures. The words and phrases Lu Xun used to describe the character of such poetry are worth considering. Good poetry is an "extremely great voice" (zhida zhi sheng), a voice that is" solemn and magnificent" (zhuangyan, chong da)Y The poetry of a powerful culture or nation is a "grand writing" (da wen); romantic writings are "beautiful, great, ennobling and uplifting" (nzeiwei, qiangli, gaoshang,fayang) and are filled with the sounds of "vigor and strength" (gangjian; pp. 63-73). Although these terms can hardly be translated without losing some of their original connotation of power, a focus on two terms dn (great, vast, gigantic) and gang (vigor, strength, power) may help us appreciate the impact of this cluster of hyperbolic phrases. Both da and gang allude to a passage in the Mencius (Meng zi) that discusses vital energy. When asked to name his chief merit, Mencius

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answered that he was good at nourishing his lzaoran z/zi qi, a phrase James Legge translated as "vast, following passion-nature." 18 Despite the many different interpretations of haomn zhi qi, it is sufficient here to see the concept as referring to a formidable moral force inherent in a virtuous man. The inner force is then identified with the vast force and "passion" of nature through a sort of anthropomorphism. Consider Mencius' characterization. The qi is extremely great (zhida) and extremely strong (zhigmzg), so much so that it is unnamable. The qi is said to fill all the spaces between heaven and earth and corresponds with righteousness and reason. Thus da and gang are descriptive of some ultimate moral force corresponding with cosmic forces. This recalls Kant's sublime phrase: "The starry skies above and the moral law within."l 9 Da also has a political dimension, as indicated in another passage in the Mencius that quotes Confucius in praise of the legendary kings of Yao and Shun: "Great [da] indeed was Yao as a sovereign. It is only Heaven that is great, and only Yao corresponds to it. How vast was his virtue! The people could find no name for it! Princely indeed was Shun' How majestic was he, having possession of the kingdom." 20 The word da, a spatial metaphor, is here stretched to mean the absolute ethico-political power, which is deemed unnamable. Kant said that the sublime is the absolutely great beyond naming; Edmund Burke associated the sublime with kingly majesty.2l Although such uncanny similarities between the Chinese concepts and the Western discourse of the sublime may be an attractive thesis for the "comparatist," it is worth pointing out that Mencius' description of ethical power in terms of da and gang and its implications are a recurrent theme in the interpretations and comparative studies of the sublime in modern China. 22 Cai Yuanpei, who repeatedly mentioned the category of the sublime in his aesthetic writings and speeches, was perhaps the first to assimilate the Western sublime into the Mencian vocabulary. In his speech "On Aesthetic Education as a Substitute for Religion," he ingeniously translated Kant's sublime of magnitude into "zhida" (extremely great) and the dynamic sublime into "zhigang" (extremely strong). 23 This is a remarkably apt translation on the denotative level: both Chinese phrases, as in Kant, refer to infinite space and ultimate pov..·er. But at the connotative level, where the words hark back to different discursive networks, there is a shift of emphasis regarding the power of culture and morality. The ease and facility with which the Western sublime is assimi-

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lated into Mencian discourse in Cai and Lu Xun is impressive. When Lu Xun was writing this essay, he also seemed to be thinking in line with Mencius, and in another essay he even used the rare phrase e sheng (voice of evil) taken directly from the Mencius. In calling for a grand style of poetry in his invocation of the Mencian vocabulary, Lu Xun' s text resonates with the classical Chinese aesthetics of grandeur, which I discuss in Chapter 3. Lu Xun conceived of the power of poetry first as a power of voice. And this voice springs from a robust body, either individual or collective. The body is one filled with vigor, vitality, and aggressiveness. The essay begins by proclaiming that "no greater or more powerful legacy presents itself to human culture than the voice of the heart" (p. 63). This heartfelt voice is bound up with the bodily vitality of a culture or a race. Indian culture is cited as a negative example: "When the Indian race lost its strength ... the most noble of voices ceased to come forth from the depths of her people's soul" (p. 63). In the next paragraph, the hidden power of the body of a race is couched in the image of primitive man. Nietzsche did not hold primitive people in contempt, asserting there was new strength among them .... One can say with certainty that the jungle provided the womb in which the harbingers of civilization were nurtured; their outwardly barbarous forms served only to belie the light that lurked within. If civilization is likened to a flower, then barbarism is its bud. If civilization is compared to a fruit, then it owes its life to flowering out of barbarism. (p. 64) One marvels at the breathless swiftness with which Lu Xun' s text "flows" from the voice to the individual body, from the race body to the primitive body and then to the organic growth of plants mixed with bodily images (womb) in this single paragraph. There are also such bodily images as breath, blood, and so on. Bodily imagery, moreover, is part of the overall organic imagery of nature. The grand poetry of the ancients is linked to the revival of the powerful voice by an enduring "breath" (p. 65). The voice of Russia, though muted under the tyranny of the tsar, is still flowing like a "subterranean river" (p. 64). The decline of a culture parallels the advance of four seasons, "slipping away from the warmth of spring into the grimness of bleak autumn" (p. 63). Lu Xun' s argument for the power of Mara poetry is carried on the waves of an organic imagery of nature. These images of nature point to Lu Xun's indebtedness to the romantics and Nietzsche.

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By means of this figurative language of nature and the body, Lu Xun attempted to depict and call for the supreme body of the poet in the gigantic stature of the Nietzschean superman. Thus, it is in the gigantic image of the body that we can ascertain Lu Xun's implied aesthetics. But such a claim will meet with objections. For did not Lu Xun call for a "warrior of the world of spirit" in this essay? Isn't the powerful voice the "voice of the heart"? Another objection might cite his well-known despair over the apathetic and grotesque bodies of the Chinese masses. He depicted these as a group of benighted onlookers who enjoy the bloody spectacle of a fellow countryman being beheaded: "The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they might be, could only serve to be made examples of or as witnesses of such futile spectacles; and it was not necessarily deplorable if many of them died of illness. The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit" (LXQJ, 1: 417). What needs fixing, Lu Xun seemed to say, is the spirit rather than the body. The bodies of the onlookers are as robust as their spirits are weak and benighted. Lu Xun abandoned his medical studies for a literary career precisely because of this switch from the body to the mind. These objections can be answered, however, by posing the question in a different way. It is not that Lu Xun emphasized spiritual enlightenment more than the revival of the body or vice versa. What mattered for him was rather the ways in which the enlightenment of consciousness is articulated in relation to the invigorating of the body. The spirit to be enlightened is not an abstractly intellectual spirit in quest of knowledge. It is an embodied spirit, a vital life force that invigorates the individual and creates a fearless and powerful adventurer and warrior. It is in such an articulation that we find in the Mam essay a statement that is not simply political, nor simply ethical in the Mencian sense, but a poetical rendering or an aestheticization of mind and body as an inseparable unity. In his analysis of Lu Xun's essay, Leo Lee has focused on the demonic poet as "a lone genius, an unabashed individualist, a rebel against social convention." 2~ Marston Anderson, on the other hand, has pointed out that the exaltation of the Nietzschean superman can be seen not so much as a sign of Lu Xun' s early individualism as a figure for the larger nationalistic project of cultural rejuvenation. 25 The distinction behveen the individual and the collective is quite clear in the arguments of the hvo critics, but this distinction may conceal the

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more intriguing interplay between the two seemingly separate realms. Lu Xun may be heralding a new culture through a glorification of the power of the individual. What is precisely" aesthetic" about Lu Xun' s essay is its focus on the private realm of emotion, spirit, bodily vitality, and impulses. These elements are then extended and made continuous with the collective vitality and well-being of Chinese culture as a whole. Culturally rejuvenated, the Chinese could quickly become a powerful nation-state in the forests of nations. But cultural rejuvenation starts at home- beginning with the individual's personal, corporeal, and mental revitalization. This cultural rejuvenation through an individual detour parallels an aesthetic detour in the essay. At one point Lu Xun argued at length that the aesthetic (meishu) is disinterested, having nothing to do with practical interests of personal livelihood and public questions of national survival. Nor does it benefit us as does commerce, industry, or other useful knowledge. Citing the Irish poet Edward Dowden, he compared aesthetic experience to the bodily exercise of swimming in the ocean. Although he does nothing useful, the swimmer by exercising vigorously, unwittingly obtains a new spiritual and physical vigor. The "useless use" (wu yong zlzi yang) of aesthetic experience, then, is to make us "forget the interests of making a living and enter into the realm of pleasure, moving to and fro between the practical and ideal worlds" (p. 71). Similarly, art provides a purposeless and playful exercise for the individual, but its purposelessness is imbued \vith a purpose further down the road. We can avoid the decaying of the spirit and body if we have literature and art to enhance our imagination and cultivate a complete personality. In his other writings, Lu Xun expressed an appreciation for the disinterested nature of literature and art, but this aesthetic detachment from the political can hardly conceal his passionate attachment to the political project of cultural rejuvenation. Just as the aesthetic has an indirect use, so the solitary and isolated image of superhuman individual has a collective appeal and cultural value. One cannot enforce a radical split between individualism and nationalism, a split that has become shopworn in studies of Chinese literature and culture. Although the distinction cannot be dispensed with, my inquiry is directed more to how the individual is articulated or enmeshed with the collective, how mental qualities are manifested in and intertwined with physical attributes, how the mind is fleshed out in the body by means of poetic language.

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The body-oriented aesthetics may be glimpsed in the title Vita Nuova (New life) that Lu Xun gave to the literary magazine he planned to launch in Japan. The name was to herald a "new birth." 26 The phrase was borrowed from Dante and corresponds to the same phrase in a passage in Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, which was modified and used by Lu Xun as an epigraph for the essay: "Whosoever has exhausted the ancient sources shall seek after springs of the future for new sources. 0 my brothers, it shall not be long before new life comes into being and new springs burst forth from within the depths" (p. 63). 27 Lu Xun's alteration of Nietzsche's original "Whoever has gained wisdom concerning ancient origins" to "Whoever has exhausted the ancient sources" may suggest a desire to seek for the new in the West and leave the Chinese tradition behind, in conformity with the contemporary spirit of reform. The "new life" is envisaged as a spring bursting forth from the depths. One would normally think of the deptl1s as lying deep down beneath where one is rather than, as the passage says, in some distant future or foreign land. This was not a paradox for Lu Xun, for he noted that although the purpose of the essay was to turn to "alien lands to seek new voices, it is motivated by a nostalgia for the past" (p. 65). It was far from Lu Xun' s purpose to pay homage to past conventions and traditions, whose oppressiveness he castigated more than anyone else in modern China. Instead he turned his eye to a remoter past, before tradition, be it Confucian, Daoist, or the industrial culture of the West, began its work of suffocation and suppression. He turned to a prehistorical or mythical past in which the people were part of raw nature and had not lost bodily vitality and imaginative exuberance. Lu Xun offered a number of variations on this primordial past. It is a time when "our early ancestors had achieved an innately spiritual communion with myriad things in nature" (p. 63). The voice of the people organically related to nature gives rise to powerful poetry, a voice that "can endure for eons, traveling across time and space to pluck the heartstrings of listeners in another age" (p. 63). Primitive people also have their offspring in modern times. Lu Xun praised Pushkin for his depiction of the simple, rustic people of the Russian poet's motherland. In Lermontov he found a kindred spirit in the latter's lifelong attachment to the villages and the country folk in the wild regions of the Caucasus. Indeed all the characters in "Mara Poetry" seem to be incarnations of a mythical vitality and force transgressing cultural con-

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ventions: the Byronic individual, pirates, outlaws, Gypsies, Lucifer, Cain, Faust, Manfred, and so on. The prospect of a "new life" thus lies in the ability of a people to tap into the vast reservoir of this mythical past and retrieve their originary energy and vitality. The primitive power is for the time being suppressed under the weight of tradition and convention, but Lu Xun still envisioned it as an organic continuity, as in the images of a flowing river, of breath or blood, or of a collective body. To share in this organic continuity is to recognize the background and the authentic identity of the people. Hence, for Lu Xun looking back is looking at the mirror image of oneself and relating to one's lost identity in the achievement of "self-awareness." "One cannot deny," he stated, "the legitimate contributions that an identification with the past may make to the process of a people's advancement ... this identification should be logically and clearly defined, so as to allow the past to function like a looking glass, the reflection of which serves to illuminate by virtue of its lessons." The future of the people will be bright, if "they can retain a certain regard for the wonders their collective past embodies" and if they are "enabled to subject their new endeavors to a process of daily renovation and at the same time to keep their ancient heritage from dying" (p. 65). What, then, is the function of poetry in this picture of loss andrecovery of the originary identity? The function of poetry lies in its overwhelming capacity to speed up the identification. Poetry serves to provoke readers into a state of spiritual elevation and emotional outburst by making them identify with a collective "poetry." This poetry has all along been lying dormant in the depths of their beings, a figure of the vast collective unconscious mind. Poets are indeed disrupters of men's hearts. For every human heart contains poetry within it, and when a poet has written a poem, it does not belong to him exclusively, but to whoever can understand it in their own heart. If there were no poetry in their heart to begin with, how could they arrive at an understanding? This is only possible because they themselves have had similar feelings but could not put them into words. Poets say these things for them. As when a musician plucks a note, a response comes immediately from the heartstrings of the audience, and the note reverberates throughout the caverns of the soul, causing all men of feeling to look up, inspired as though they were gazing at some new dawn ablaze with light that has the power to strengthen, ennoble, beautify, and enlighten. (p. 68)

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The scenario bears much resemblance to the scene I evoked earlier in which Mencius extolled the legendary Yao and Shun until they become sublimely unrepresentable for the awe-inspired people. The difference here is that in their emotional elevation the people behold the sublime image of their hidden poetic energy surging forth and becoming manifest. In this intensely poetic experience, they recognize the identity of themselves as a community of common feeling and as a po>verfulliving body. The bodily dimension of Lu Xun' s aesthetics is also illustrated in his biographical sketches of the Marn poets. lt is true that poetry appeals to the spirit and the heart. The image of plucking the strings of the heart in the passage quoted above, taken from classical Chinese poetrv, points to the psychical and affective dimension of Mara poetry. On the other hand, poetry must also be able to spur the audience into bodily movement and aggressive action. "Poetry is supposed to transform the feelings of human beings," Lu Xun wrote, "and to elevate a people to a new plane of righteousness, honesty, beauty, strength, and daring actions" (p. 69). The idea of poetry as a spur to bodily agitation led Lu Xun to transfer the poetic power of Mara poetry to the physical power of the individual poets themselves. He stresses the poets' belligerence and combativeness as warriors so much that these qualities overwhelm their poetic talents. What these poets ha\·e in common is that they "took up arms and joined the bloody fray" or "like duelists, they thrust and parried, leaped and dodged, before crowds that looked on with terror and excitement as they waged a life-and-death struggle" (p. 100). The distinction between the psychic and the bodily, between the individual and the public, is of no consequence as the aggressive body, set on fire by poetry, is staged as a theatrical spectacle before the people as the audience. The people are inspired and galvanized into acting in unison as a huge collective body. In a revealing passage, Lu Xun described this collective body in action by citing German examples His references to the French-Prussian conflicts in 1806 and 1812 and the German author E. M. Arndt are significant, for it was during this period that Arndt developed an organic theory of the pure German race as a unified living whole, a theory that provided naturalistic definitions and bodily metaphors for a much-needed national unity against foreign aggressions. 28 Arndt's Geist der Zeit and his book on the magnificent rivers of Germany, Lu Xun noted, rallied many students, poets, and artists under the banner of patriotism. The most out-

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standing was Theodor Korner, a poet-warrior whose career and poetry best exemplify the intimate connection of the aesthetic and the political. The title of his collection of poems, Leier und Sc/zwert (The lyre and the sword), is telling, and Lu Xun' s commentary seems to be caught in a swirl of emotional fervor and bodily rhythm. Korner's poetry fires" the pulse of any reader," his zeal and ardor are a" common attribute of German youth," and the poet's voice is a "voice that spoke for all Germans- his blood that of a nation" (p. 70). The power that defeated Napoleon, Lu Xun concluded at the end of the passage, came not from the Prussian monarchy, nor from the army or weapons, but from the people. It is a people who are the embodiment of their own poetry and who are "endowed with poetry" (p. 70). With a language of voice, pulse, and blood- an organic language of nature- Lu Xun converted the particular individual poet into an image of the aesthetic-political body and finally into a poetically enthused nationalist community. The gigantic body in Lu Xun' s text is not a flesh-and-blood body with physiological attributes and needs. We Jive and experience our bodily states and impulses as biological beings, but physically we cannot experience ourselves as a whole. To have a unified and total picture of ourselves, we need to perceive and imagine an image or a certain figurative construction of our bodies. We come to know ourselves and recognize our identity only through a schematized or an idealized image rather than through the fragmented, partial, and infinitely complex and perplexing process of the physical body. 29 The body image that Lu Xun built in his text is just such an idealized, poeticized, and identity-forming image. Lu Xun invited his readers to project the body into the Mara poets, the primitive man, the romantic superman, and Chinese culture. He hoped that the augmented and empowered image may come back to us, gigantic with new meaning and value, capable of revitalizing and fortifying us with the sublime force of rivers and mountains. This attempt to aestheticize the body and to make it metaphorical in the larger realms of culture and politics aligned Lu Xun with a development in Western aesthetic thinking at the turn of the century. Describing an obsessional turn toward the aesthetic in Western philosophy in the late nineteenth century, Walter Benjamin remarked that what this tendency tried to invoke "was poetry, preferably nature, and, most recently, the age of myths." This philosophy attempted to salvage the genuine and authentic human experience that

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was quickly dwindling in an age marked by increasing mechanization and the decline of traditional values. And this "life philosophy," Benjamin suggestively added, "is oriented toward biology." 30 In his analysis of Nietzsche's Will to Power, a work whose themes are relevant to Lu Xun's thinking, Martin Heidegger offered a more explicit explanation for the aesthetic return to biology and the body. He singled out the bodily state of "affects" -feelings, desire, and emotionas the central issue of Nietzsche's philosophy of life. The arousal of frenzied feeling and the unle~shing of affects are taken as a welcome rescue of life in danger of atrophy. "Rising on swells of feeling would have to substitute for a solidly grounded and articulated position in the midst of beings, the kind of thing that only great poetry and thought can create." 31 In the epoch of epistemological uncertainties, when the essential purposes of human beings are in doubt, when little in a culture can hold together its tattered fabrics of deep-seated beliefs and ideology, poetry or art takes on a gigantic mission. Arousing affects and imagination to a sublime intensity, poetry can celebrate the national community and substitute for religion. By extolling the sublime figure of the Mara poet, Lu Xun was treading on the same ground and treating poetry in a maimer comparable to Wagner's elevation of poetry and music into the collective artwork. 32 What he extolled was an art or poetry animated by the vigor of the collective body. Lu Xun's aesthetic concerns were eminently mythopoetic and profoundly political. His was a huge attempt to create a magnificent form of art, one capable of recovering the lost vitality of Chinese culture and fashioning a strong national identity.

Symbol and Allegory Figurative language, rich in organic images of nature and the body, enables Lu Xun to envision the collective body of the people. This language derives from an organic view of language shared by Lu Xun' s contemporaries, its strongest advocate being Hu Shi. In this view, Chinese literary history is based on a vernacular language and literature. In contrast to the literary language (wenyan), this plain spoken vernacular (haihua) springs from the lived experience of the common folk and is used in everyday life. It is indistinguishable from the genuine strata of Chinese reality. To effect social change in China, Hu Shi claimed, the reformers should promote this living stream of language and discard the moribund classical language.3 3 In its living

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symbiosis with the whole culture, the new language will allow its advocates to fall back on a mode of representation by which the "essence" of China can be transparently rewritten. This cultural essence can be rewritten as a center illuminating the new speech, the people, literature, consciousness, and above all "reality." In Lu Xun's depiction of the powerful body, we can also note a smooth passage from the mythical past to the Chinese race, from the race to the people and nation, rapidly culminating in the superhuman figure of the poet as the crystallization, the apotheosis, of his countrymen's poetic and creative power. Fredric Jameson observes that in Lu Xun's writing an ostensibly private figure endowed with a libidinal dynamic often projects a political dimension. This is an example of what he calls "national allegory," which he sees as characterizing Third World texts. The figure of Ah Q, for example, serves" as the allegory of a certain set of Chinese attitudes and modes of behavior." 34 This description seems to agree with what I have observed about the buttressing of the figurative body by organic language in Lu Xun's Mara essay. But a question arises here concerning the term "allegory." In the romantic tradition, to which Lu Xun was indebted, organic diction presupposes a symbolic connection between a sign and its meaning, a belief opposite to the assumption of allegory. This symbolic structure does not recognize a disjunction between, in Paul de Man's words, "the way in which the world appears in reality and the way it appears in language." De Man describes the symbol in this way: "In the world of the symbol it would be possible for the image to coincide with the substance, since the substance and its representation do not differ in their being but only in their extension: they are part and whole of the same set of categories."35 Whereas de Man's remark accords with Lu Xun's figurative language, it is precisely to this symbolic structure that Jameson tries to oppose the concept of allegory. Jameson presents the allegory as a disruptive force fracturing the symbolic unity found in what he calls the "monumental unifications of an older modernist symbolism or even realism."36 The new concept of allegory that Jameson invokes in relation to Lu Xun is not based on a traditional one-to-one relation between a figure and an idea. On the contrary, it is conceived as "a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous representation of the symboJ."3 7 This concept of allegory represents a general trend in contemporary

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criticism to focus on instability, breaks, and self-deconstructive potentials inherent in language and other signifying processes, a strand of thought that has led to the revival of interest in the works of Walter Benjamin. Although Jameson's invocation of allegory can be referred to Benjamin's theory of allegory- a link we can adduce from his study of Benjamin in his Marxism and Form- his presentation of Ah Q as an allegory of many "Chinas" does not, in my view, quite bear out his own definition of allegory and the theoretical potential of Benjamin's notion. Jameson sees Ah Q as multivocal, as a range of distinct or incompatible meanings representative of "China," but he does not attend to the unstable and at times impossible character of this representational mode. This question about the possibility and impossibility of language and representation is crucial to Benjamin's theory of allegory, and it preoccupied Lu Xun in his reflections on writing about China's problems. An analysis of the relation between symbol and allegory can enlarge our present frame of discussion and enable us to trace shifts in Lu Xun from a symbolic notion of language to a more self-critical awareness of its limits. This self-critical and at times distrustful attitude toward language and writing informs Lu Xun's Wild Grass, a group of extremely fragmented prose poems written between September 1924 and April 1926. It will also allow us to see allegorical uses of language by Eileen Chang, who explored the disruptive potential of the insignificant detail, the fragment, and the singular in her work. The romantic notion of the symbol as a seamless unity of form and content sets itself up in opposition to allegory. In the influential essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality," de Man points out that in the romantic tradition allegory is habihially denigrated and denounced, because the allegorical form sets the sensuous image at odds with the abstract idea. Romanticism dismisses allegory as dryly rational and dogmatic because the allegorical image refers to a realm of abstract meaning that the image does not adequately embody, whereas it values the symbol because it is founded" on an intimate unity between the image that rises up before the senses and the supersensory totality that image suggests." De Man singles out the synecdoche as the paradigm of the symbol exemplified in Coleridge's theory. The symbol is structured like the synecdoche, where the part is continuous with the whole, where the rich and dense material of form is animated in all its parts by a transcendental spiriPB

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Symbol and allegory, however, may not be as radically opposed as they appear in romantic theory. Paul de Man shows that the seed of the allegorical split between form and content, between the sensuous image and suprasensory idea, already troubles the serene unity of symbol. He brings to light the "unsaid" or the "unthought" of the romantic theory of symbol and succeeds in articulating the problematic nature of the symbolic construct by detecting the contrary and reciprocal movement between the symbolic and the allegorical within romantic theory. Despite the romantic critics' insistence on the indivisible unity between image and spirit, de Man shows that they said of the symbol what they said about allegory. They tried, quite unwittingly, to spiritualize the symbol until its material or organic existence, by which the symbol is defined, "has become altogether unimportant; symbol and allegory alike now have a common origin beyond the world of matter." In Coleridge's discussion, for example, the symbol at one moment refers to a transcendent realm of significance that is harmonized with the sensuous image in an organic unity. Yet, at another moment, the transcendent significance appears to lie far beyond the symbolic image's capacity to accommodate and embody, just as in the case of the allegorical sign. "The reference, in both cases, to a transcendent source, is now more important than the kind of relationship that exists between the reflection and its source. It becomes of secondary importance whether this relationship is based, as in the case of the symbol, on the organic coherence of the synecdoche, or whether, as in the case of allegory, it is a pure decision of the mind. Both figures designate, in fact, the transcendent source, albeit in an oblique and ambiguous way." Through a will to symbol, the romantic critics tried to bridge the gap between form and content, sensuous and abstract, singular and general. 39 The deconstructive acuity with which Paul de Man tears apart the symbol in the direction of allegory is already evident in Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, which inspired much of de Man's thinking on aesthetics. In this book Benjamin also sought to dispel the romantic aura surrounding symbol and dismember the ideal body of classical apotheosis in the light of baroque allegory. Benjamin traced the lineage of the romantic theory of symbol to classicism, especially to the classical ideal of apotheosis exemplified by the perfect human body. 40 It seems uncanny in this regard that in Lu Xun's works it is also a gigantic image of the body, depicted in an organic language, that fleshes out and heralds the abstract idea of the

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new people. Since the symbol is bound up with the body, it is instructive to see how Benjamin developed his theory of allegory in conjunction with Hegel's theory of classical symbol and the ideal of apotheosis. In the Aesthetics, Hegel asserted that classical art meets the "demand that the Idea and its formative configuration as concrete realization must be brought together under a mode of complete adequacy."41 Hegel considered the idea in perfect consonancy with its figurative embodiment as the ideal of art: "Only in the highest art are the Idea and the artistic presentation h·uly consonant with one another in the sense that the objective embodiment of the Idea is in itself essentially realized as the true configuration, because the content of the Idea thus expressed is itself in truth the genuine content" (p. 102). Hegel was careful to distinguish what he called "formal" and "necessary consonancy." In formal consonancy, the content seeks outside itself for an adequate form adapted to the expression of its significance, whereas in the Ideal art, the abstract idea carries the principle of its manifestation in itself and is thereby the "means of its own manifestation" (p. 1 02). In this expression of the Ideal, there is no longer any antithesis between the idea and its material embodiment, for the idea itself bears its own principle of figuration. It is a completely "concrete Idea" (p. 105). The soul is fully at one with the body. This mode of expression dotes on the human bodily form as the perfect locus of unity where the Idea and its outward embodiment coalesce. "The natural form of the human body," Hegel said, is "such a sensuous concrete capable of displaying Spirit in its essential concreteness and of adapting itself wholly to such a presentment" (p. 97). Yet this bodily oneness of content and form is brought about not without effort or even violence. Hegel argued strongly for such a seamless unity, to be achieved by exclusion and expulsion. Although he insisted that the Idea as a concrete spirituality already possesses a material, expressive shape, he nevertheless admitted that matching the transcendent idea to the human body is a process of personification and anthropomorphism. This personifying gesture necessarily involves a move to expel all that is" defective" in the human body in order, paradoxically, to enhance the idea's embodiment. The human bodily form, then, is employed in the classical type of art not as purely sensuous existence, but exclusively as the existence and natural shape appropriate to mind. It has therefore to be relieved of all the defective excrescences which adhere to it in its pure physical

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aspect, and from the contingent finiteness of its phenomenal appearance. The external shape must in this way be purified in order to express itself the content adequate for such a purpose; and, furthermore, along with this, so that coalescence of import and embodiment may be complete, the spirituality which constitutes the content must be of such a character that it is completely able to express itself in the natural form of man, without projecting beyond the limits of such expression within the sensuous and purely physical sphere of existence. (p. 106) In this statement, the "natural" form of man, which is supposed to be the symbolic embodiment of the Spirit, can be "natural" only by expelling the unnatural "defective excrescences" and by being purified of its physical excess. It seems rather paradoxical that given such defective excrescences that stubbornly cling to and thus mar the purity of the human body, the body can still be said to coalesce with the spirit in a translucent unity. Hegel indicated, however, that such "defective excrescences" in the human body are the seed of the dissolution of the classical Ideal. This point alludes to allegory. In order to keep the ideal apotheosis in the classical statue, "the accidental character" of its external manifestation in the bodily form "is to the least extent emphasized" (p. 261). And thought has to "annul" this accidental character and finite contingency in order to achieve the conception of harmonious unity (p. 261 ). But this annulling gesture- a strategy of exclusion on the part of symbolizing thought-does not quite exorcise the excesses of corporeal contingency and excrescences. The unbridgeable antithesis between the infinite spirit and the finite bodily form still haunts the harmonious and spirit-filled classical body and threatens to split it apart. The contingent, accidental, and individual attributes of the bodily form, in which Greek gods are formed, threaten to involve the gods in the "contradictions and conflicts of limited finitude" (p. 262). Consequently, the universal in the Greek gods is unable to be embodied in bodily form as individuals without detriment to the pure Ideal. The necessity of casting the transcendent Spirit in the body thus turns the gods into the reverse of "that condition which truly constitutes the notion of what they are essentially and in virtue of their divine nature" (p. 263). To put it simply, the Greek gods are spiritual, divine and universal, and to materialize them in the human body, enmeshed in flesh-and-blood excrescences, is to denigrate their divine spirituality.

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What is being enacted here is the perennial conflict in Western philosophy that first plaved itself out in the Athenian marketplace. On one side, there is Socratic and Platonic idealism preaching the Spirit at the expense of the body. On the other side, there is the Diogenesian grotesque body that farts, shits, exhibits itself, and masturbates in public, pissing against the Idealistic wind. 42 Now in such a drama of conflict over the body in the guise of a symbol-versus-allegory debate, what could be the gesture that yokes the defective body and the highflown Spirit into a symbolic unity if not some sleight of hand and a will to unity? What seems to be at issue here is a dilemma of the symbolizing mind disconcerted by its side glance at the allegorical split as it tries to smooth over the abyss between universal and particular, content and form, sense and supersensory idea. The abstract idea threatens to burst the too fragile and finite vessel of the earthly human body. Or to put it the other wav around: the finite and contingent body always threatens to fragment the abstract idea. In fact, the defective excrescences of the human body, and indeed all the densely physical aspects and sensuous multiplicity- the thingness of things in general- seem resistant to the symbolizing power of the spirit. This contradiction is inherent in the very nature of art. "The defect, such as it is," Hegel conceded, "is due to the defect which obtains in art itself throughout, the limitations of its entire province" (pp. 1067). The limitations consist in the unresolvable conflict between the finite, sensuous form and the infinite Spirit. At best, the former can clothe the latter only in an awkward guise. One may concede that classical art sets up the perfect fusion of the spirit and the sensuous form." As a matter of fact, however," Hegel continued, "in this fusion mind itself is not represented agreeably to its true notional concept. Mind is the infinite subjectivity of the Idea, which as absolute inwardness is not capable of freely expanding in its entire independence, so long as it remains within the mold of bodily shape, fused therein as in the existence wholly congenial to it" (p. 107). The last sentence in this quoted passage is paradoxical but revealing. On the one hand, the Idea is incapable of expanding its freedom and independence, being shackled in the narrow mold of the body, yet it is also fused therein and seems quite at home with this "congenial" shape. If the incompatibility of the infinite Spirit and the finite bodily form is native to art, even to the classical art, then how can the Spirit find a congenial home in the body or any other sensuous form, except by a violent gesture of inscribing, imprinting, engraving,

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the body's surface? If the infinite Spirit always has to be confronted with the fate of being shackled in some finite sensuous form marred with defective excrescences, even in the classical statue, then what is the symbolic unity of content and form but a violent yoking (joking?) together of the idea and the sensuous form? What is a symbol after all if not a place where the abstract idea and the image have been fused and mystified, quite willfully, into a seamless unity? Benjamin's analysis reveals the precariousness of the symbolic unity of content and form and the ready dissolution of the unity under the allegorical gaze. Allegory is bent on seeing the fundamental disjunction and incommensurability between form and content. Just as classical theory doted on the human body as the perfect place of the symbolic unity, Benjamin also chose the body to dismantle the unity of the symbol of apotheosis. He evoked the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann's allegorical examination of the bodily statue. Where classical theory saw an image of organic unity, a statue of unbroken whole, Winckelmann saw a fragmented image full of "holes." As Benjamin noted, Winckelmann scrutinized not a spiritfilled body as the highest fullness of being, but a torso. Winckelmann went over the torso part by part, limb by limb, in a very unclassical and nonsymbolic procedure. In this examination, which can be called "allegorical dismemberment," the plastic symbol was stripped naked of its putative essence. "In the field of allegorical intuition," commented Benjamin, "the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. The false appearance of totality is extinguished. For the eidos disappears, the simile ceases to exist, and the cosmos which it contained shrivels up" (p. 176). Under the artificial light of allegory, the transcendental radiance which is supposed to emanate from within and animate all parts of the symbol, is revealed to be an artificial light itself, just like the artificial light of allegory. This is what allegory can do to the plastic art, the image of symbolic unity par excellence. This allegorical undermining of the symbolic is, as Benjamin pointed out, an intrusion, a "harsh disturbance of the peace and a disruption of law and order in the arts" (p. 177). What makes this disturbance possible is the fact that the symbolic construct- the organic human figure, for example- already contains within itself the seeds of allegory. Indeed, one can argue that the symbolic is a special case of the allegorical. In the symbol, the unbridgeable disjunction between spirit and body, content and form, is yoked

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into a mystified moment of organic unity, so much so that the symbolic construct tends to erase itself as a product of the joining of the disjunctive exh·emes. In a transfigurative flash, the symbol blots out the memory of its coming into being. Allegory is an attempt to return this memory to symbol. Whereas the symbol manages somehow to breathe life and spirit into a sign and makes the sign a resplendent moment of "truth," the allegory deprives the symbol of spirit and life and reveals it to be nothing but another sign. It is to this symbolic unity that Benjamin opposed the allegorical conception of language. He critiqued the symbolic conception of language by stressing the allegorical split between form and content, thus emphasizing the factitious nature of language and representation. Benjamin's idea of allegory, although derived from a reading of baroque linguistic practice, is a complex and potentially rewarding concept for understanding and describing changes in modes of perception and consciousness in the modern world. Although this is not a place to elaborate on his theory, below I sketch some of its features that seem most relevant to the problematic of writing and representation as allegory in Lu Xun' s work. In the symbolic conception of language, the voice is a favored metaphor. The spoken word seems spontaneous and transparent and thus gives a sense of a "natural" bond between breath and spirit, voice, and idea. The allegorical perspective, however, sees the voice as merely an echo and a linguistic gesture of writing. Echoes are the characteristic speech of the stock character in German baroque plays called the "intriguer," who re-echoes, repeats, and ventriloquizes the voices of others. Thus, rather than a spontaneous expression of the inner spirit, the voice becomes a play of linguistic convention. "The organ of speech," Benjamin said, "writes in order to speak." "Word and script are, at source, one, and neither is possible without the other" (p. 214). As a gesture of writing, the echo severs the "natural" tie between the voice and the spirit. The second feature pertains to the temporal structure of allegory. The experience of the symbol is the mythical instant pregnant with rich meaning, in which past, present, and future can be fused and suddenly glimpsed in an organic continuity and simultaneous copresence. Thus, the symbolic stresses the "organic, mountain and plant-like quality" (p. 165) as intimating natural permanence. Beneath this timeless instant, allegory detects ceaseless mutations and breaks up the organic continuity into a series of disjointed moments. For de

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Man, "allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin" and, renounces "the nostalgia and the desire to coincide." 43 An allegorical sign refers to a previous sign, with which it does not identify. The emphasis on mutability extends the allegorical perspective to a view of nature and history, which is the third feature relevant to our analysis. Nature is regarded not as an organic process of growth "in bud and bloom" (p. 179) but as a process of decay and decline, subject to the material necessity of death. Thus ruins, debris, corpses, and wilderness become focal images of allegorical representation; sickness, melancholy, and mourning are its subjective tenor. History is seen as the other side of the material (non-organic) nature subject to decay and death. The observer equipped with the allegorical vision, Benjamin observed in a startling statement, is "confronted with the facies hippocratica (the death's head) of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face-or rather in a death's head" (p. 166). To compress nature and history into a ghastly image of the skull is to abandon organic unity and its symbolic expressi~n and to call into doubt the easy production of meaning itself. In the face of death, all representation seems to be a conh·ived but hopeless gesture doomed to fade into nothingness: "The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance" (p. 166). These three elements reveal that allegory can be seen, not conventionally as rhetorical figure, but as an attitude, a critical consciousness, that posits a fundamental disjunction between voice and body, form and content, representation and reality, narrative and history. All schemes of representation and signification, while striving to do their job, represent "precisely the non-existence" of what they represent (p. 233).

Allegorical Ruins of'Wild Grass" These elements drawn from Benjamin's theory of allegory, though oversimplified, may help shed some light on Jameson's remark in his analysis of Lu Xun that allegory is "a matter of breaks and heterogeneities." They may enrich Jameson's insights into allegory as the privileged mode of modern perception and consciousness. Allegory, as Jameson puts it, is" a clumsy deciphering of meaning from moment to moment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity to heterogeneous, disconnected instants." 44 Jameson's attempt to relate the allegori-

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cal in Lu Xun to modern consciousness is a fascinating line of inquiry. Other critics have touched on the affinity between the prose poems of Wild Grass and Baudelaire's Petits poemes en prose. Some have analyzed Lu Xun's use of epigrammatic and hybrid language, the tensions between the contorted linguistic structures and the tormented psyche, and the experience of reading the pieces as a painful process of deciphering.~5 In the following I examine the allegorical in Wild Grass as an exploration of the difficulties of writing. The organic imagen' of "On the Power of Mara Poetry" indicates that Lu Xun kept faith with an organic conception of language. But around early 1920, especially during the period preceding Wild Grass, a drastic shift in his thinking about language and writing occurred because of his growing disillusionment with the prevalent ideology of revolution and reform Since there are already many studies in this regard, I focus here on the shift in relation to writing, arguably the result of his ideological disillusionment. His reflection on writing in the essay "How to Write" ("Zenme xie") reveals a number of motifs that would be dramatized in Wild Grass. The title question in this essay indicates a turning away from the question "What to write?" The what question, focusing on the pre-given "content" of the New Literature, of which language is but the unmediated outward form, was of utmost importance in Hu Shi' s organic theory of language. Lu Xun turned his attention to the arbitrary and constructed nature of writing by counterpoising it to organic language. "Nietzsche loved to read books written in blood," he wrote, evoking an image redolent of his favorite romantic poets, "but there are probably no blood-written books." Writing is always done in ink. What is written in blood is nothing but bloodstains. Naturally bloodstains are more exciting and stirring to the soul and more clear-cut, but their colors change and fade easily. This alone shows that writing must depend on the willful exercise of the writer's talent. Like the skeleton in the grave, writing from time immemorial has always taken pride in its permanence in utter contempt of the faint blush on a girl's face• 6 Writing leaves traces that seem more permanent than the transient bloom on a pretty face, but for all their "permanence" these traces are likened to the skeletal remains of a bygone life. The vision of writing as a record of loss and death recurs frequently in Wild Grass and other works by 1"u Xun. In the epilogue to a

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collection of essays entitled The Grave (Fen), Lu Xun described his texts as obsolete traces, bearing witness to a vanished life. When confronted by them, he was often seized with a deep sense of melancholy. 47 The real, original scene that gave rise to this sense of melancholy was a desolate landscape where Lu Xun frequently went to muse during his nocturnal contemplations when he taught at Xiamen University in southern China. This scene was obsessively haunting and is evoked again in relation to the question of how to write. One can, he said, write about the grand themes of nation, society, and civilization and so on, but the scene of gloom comes to mind and makes all the big topics hollow and futile. I am sinking, sinking, in quietude. The quietude thickens like aging wine and makes me slightly intoxicated. Looking out of the rear window toward the hills looming like bones, I see some white spots; they are graves covered with weeds. A tiny dark yellow light- that is the lamp in the Temple of Nanputuo. In front of me is the obscure, vast expanse of heaven and sea. The inky black night seems to be striking home and cutting me to the quick. Leaning on the stone parapet, I listen to my own heartbeats. All around there seem to be endless sadness, melancholy, loss, and death, all of which merge into this quietude, making it a wine drugged with herbal medicine, with color, flavor, and fragrance added. At this moment I want to write, yet I cannot write and do not even know where to begin. 48 As Lu Xun admitted, this scene was the backdrop for a statement in the Foreword to Wild Grass: "When I am silent, I feel full; as I open my mouth to speak, I am conscious of emptiness."~ 9 The array of natural objects here stretches out to form an inhuman landscape of ominous, blank expanse. From this expanse, no "voice" can spring organically; no meaning can emerge spontaneously. Writing against such a gloomy scene seems to be a contrived and arbitrary inscription of letters, which are also subject to death and oblivion. On the other hand, Lu Xun derived some pleasure from the melancholy of savoring medicinal '"'ine of his own making in all its aged mellowness and bitterness. This is not to say that Lu Xun believed writing should be abandoned altogether. The attempt to write in full awareness of the futility of the effort leads to a sense of melancholy. But the melancholy is accompanied by the pleasure of nostalgia. This is the reason memory assumes much importance in many pieces in Wild Grass. Lu Xun tried to capture in writing the unapproachable memory traces of the past, yet

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the more he attempted to freeze them in words, the further they receded into the distance. We can read some pieces in Wild Grass as a straining, in pain mixed with pleasure, toward some imaginary unity of experience and writing, an undertaking that Lu Xun' s allegorical consciousness rendered impossible. This underscores the fact that stylistically Wild Grass is often marked by disjointed paragraphs and sentences, unconventional images, a hybrid language, and mixing of literary genres. Instead of symbolic fluidity with ready access to meaning, the reader encounters rugged lines, a fragmented texture, semantic twists and turns, hesitant thoughts, harsh tones, and so on. The pieces that recollect the experience of childhood seem to have achieved some sense of unity of past and present, and their comforting emblems anchor the desired symbolic unity of experience and writing. But such lyrical reminiscences are often signals of their impending demise: they are inaccessible except in dreams and are inimical to neat linguistic forms. "The Good Story" ("Hao de gushi") provides a good instance of this pattern. As in many other pieces, the setting is the dead of night in a dimly lit room. As the narrator sits alone in this dream-like atmosphere, involuntary memories surge forth in a series of charming images from his childhood: thatched cottages, country girls, a rowboat on an azure stream, rustic scenes of countryfolk on the riverbank, the sky and clouds .... But even as these beautiful things become more and more distinct and enthralling, the narrator draws attention to the work of interweaving and intermingling the images and describes it as a telltale textual construction without "ending." First appearing in the eye of the beholder, the scenes and objects then become reflected images on the water of the stream; they are constantly broken, stretched, and interwoven with other images. A closer gaze, however, opens the narrator's eyes "with a start to see the whole cloud tapestry wrinkle and tangle as if someone had thrown a big stone into the water" (p. 186). As the narrator reaches for a pen in a desperate attempt to record the" good story," he is left with the dim lamplight beside him in the middle of a dull and dark night. "The Good Story" thus tells a story about how a story is being told through a dramatization of its constructive and self-effacing process. A story woven from memories secures an identification, however temporary, between the writer and his past experiences. This identification appears in a number of pieces in Wild Grass as an object or scene bathed in emotional ambience. This ambience can be understood as an

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"aura" in Benjamin's well-known definition of modern perception and sensibility. The aura describes emotional associations surrounding a work of art or an object that allows an imaginary identification of the subject with his or her past experience and cultural tradition. But the concept of aura is Janus-faced: one would not single out the aura as something to be treasured if it were not imperiled. As we have seen in Chapter 1, Wang Guowei was an aura seeker. Yet just as the discovery of the "national essence" in the late Qing period is symptomatic of the disintegration of the previously unquestioned wholeness of tradition, so too the aura already points to the withering of the auratic object in the direction of those inanimate objects, inscriptions, and reproducible signs and artifacts that lack an aura. This ambivalence seems implicit in Benjamin's oft-quoted enigmatic definition: we can define the aura of a natural object "as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be." 5° It is revealing that Benjamin sets the natural object over against the product of socio-historical circumstances. The former somehow still retains the aura, whereas the latter is devoid of it. But even the a uratic object in nature is enshrined in an unapproachable distance, and the beholder, in the "close" throng of human artifacts, can only long for its vanishing halo. Thus, the very pursuit of the aura dialectically implies an awareness of the widening distance between subject and object, between sign and meaning. It is clear that this double-edged implication of aura corresponds to the inherent ambivalence in the relation between symbol and allegory, and it thus becomes useful for describing the textual dynamic in Lu Xun' s prose poems. The pieces with abundant descriptions of natural objects include "Snow" ("Xue" ), "The Kite" ("Fengzheng"), "Autumn Night" ("Qiu ye"), and "The Blighted Leaf'' ("La ye"). Unlike works that create a sepulchral world of graves, hell, corpses, mutilated bodies, and anguished souls, these are the most "lyrical" poems in the collection. "Snow" for example, begins by giving snow a beautiful look: "The snow south of the Yangtze is extremely moist and pretty, like the first indefinable intimation of spring, or the bloom of a young girl radiant with health" (p. 180). The motif of natural bloom is repeated in other pieces, linking natural objects with spring, color, brightness, life, human activity, and all the vivacious signs and appearances in organic imagery. Beneath these appearances, however, the razor-sharp gaze of the narrator always penetrates to the stark reality of their transience and inevitable decay and destruction. In a contrastive piece entitled

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"Revenge" ("Fu chou"), the narrator writes in coldly anatomical detail about another organic image, this time the blooming skin of the human body: "Only one stab through the 'peach-colored skin' will make the hot red blood spurt out," to be followed by the "exhalation of icy breath, the sight of pallid lips" (p. 172). In a less ghastly fashion, signs of spring and life in "Snow" are revealed to be transitory in comparison with the impersonal snow in the north. The snow in the south entices children to build a snowman in the shape of a Buddha, which is gradually endowed with more and more human features. Here the building process is analogous to the anthropomorphic tendency in symbolic diction to endow things with a human body. Yet with the change of weather, the snow Buddha melts and freezes until it "looks like opaque crystal" (p. 180). By contrast, the snowflakes in the north, though death-like and inhuman as scattered white powder, do not suffer such vicissitudes, and their death hues, devoid of emotional aura, seem to be a fitting emblem in which to rest the mind troubled by the transience of things and meaning. "The Blighted Leaf" presents a more ostensible allegory of how the a uratic object is easily drained of its emotional halo. In the preface to the English translation of Wild Grass, Lu Xun stated that he wrote this piece as an answer to those attempting to preserve his writing. 51 With this in mind one can read the "leaf" in this text, whether in Chinese or English, as a pun, referring to both tree leaf (ye) and book leaf (also pronounced ye). And in the poem the leaf serves as a bookmark for the narrator. The story begins by telling how the narrator never noticed the maple leaves in his courtyard when they were green, but now as autumn comes, his eyes fall on a blighted leaf. An identification is established here between the human eye and an inanimate object, and the object takes on an aura through the image of the look: the blighted leaf "stared at you like some bright eye from the checkered red, yellow and green" (p. 219). This look is not a softening, communicative human glance, but seems to contain an element of shock, or at least a sense of estrangement for the viewer. When the narrator gazes again at this blighted leaf after he has preserved it in a book for a year, the "look" from the leaf becomes less bright, and he reflects that in time not only the look but even the memory of this leaf will vanish into oblivion. The tension between the narrator's desire for a corresponding look from the inanimate object is intensified in" Autumn Night." Here again in a melancholy surrounding the narrator looks at the night sky.

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The stars have eyes, but they "blink coldly" (p. 162), and around their lips plays a crooked smile masking a vast and hidden malignancy. The sky looks inhuman, inert, and ominous, and the moon has a metallic blankness. The narrator describes the sky's alienating look as he looks up: "I have never seen such a strange, high sky. It seems to want to leave this world of men, so that when folk look up they won't be able to see it" (p. 162). If the night sky is the least likely" object" that one might endow or endear with any human intent or aura, the flowers may be more responsive to a tender look from the poet. The narrator evokes an image of emotional empathy between flowers and a poet, which alludes to the celebrated lines of the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu: "Feeling the times, flowers draw (shed) tears/ Hating to part, birds alarm the heart."52 It is customary in Chinese criticism to take this emotional empathy as the hallmark of the relation of man and nature in classical Chinese poetry, where emotion blends seamlessly with objects (comparable to the symbolic body of classical art discussed earlier). Set against the vast impersonal sky and ridiculed with a tone of mockery in" Autumn Night," such wishful correspondences between man and nature are revealed to be illusory. Another crucial element in "Autumn Night" is that of voice. Sounds are heard in the dark night, but there is no mutual and spontaneous resonance between the voice of man and the sounds of nature. In the nocturnal scene fraught with mysteries and bad omens, a fierce night bird shrieks, and muffled laughter, hoarse and raucous, echoes in the air. The midnight laughter, like that resounding in a madhouse, comes from the narrator himself, as he realizes only in an afterthought. This time lag sounds as if his body, voice, and consciousness were split into disjointed parts. Now, the humanizing aura is something permeating the subject's imaginary identification with objects. With the harsh and jarring echoes, stark images and estranging "looks" of nature, "Autumn Night" employs language and arranges images in such a way as to make the aura impossible. The form of writing in "Autumn Night" can be seen as "allegorical" in the sense that it disturbs human and natural presence as immediate vehicles of meaning and value, which "flow" symbolically into representation. Lacking symbolic fluidity, writing is no longer a transparent representation of things, but struggles to represent things in the full knowledge that written inscriptions are only an awkward and poor emblem. Writing in this sense reveals its blatantly factitious

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character as a tentative experiment and construction. Critics have noticed that Lu Xun's writing frequently evinces an ironic distance toward itself. 53 Lu Xun often used language, whether classical Chinese or the Europeanized vernacular, with a critical distance and ironic slant. Whether as a narrator or as an essayist, the speaking subject often remains equivocal and refuses to sustain a smooth passage of meaning and transparent relation among his position, his intentions, and the language. Lu Xun wrote about this self-critical practice with theoretical precision in the essay "How to Write." In this essay, Lu Xun first took issue with a proposition by Yu Dafu. Yu believed that the first-person autobiographical mode is the most convincing form of v.-riting. In contrast, the third-person form, being the narrator's guesswork about the thoughts and feelings of others, tends to lack authenticity and is likely to disappoint the reader. Lu Xun replied that literary works are largely the expression of oneself through the other, or the speculation about others from the vantage point of the self. If we see a work as a construct (zaozuo), the difference between first and third person and questions of authenticity and verisimilitude quickly lose their relevance. But if all works of language arc constructs and inescapably figural, are they merely fictional? Are all writers engaged in a game of fiction and fantasy? In answering this question, Lu Xun rejected any association of falsity with fiction and pointed to the "truth" in fiction, thus asserting the fundamental fictionality of language and even consciousness. He liked to read the Dream of the Red Chamber, he said, but \vas repulsed by the contemporary attempt to create a putatively real diary by Lin Daiyu. Similarly he preferred the fiction of Zheng Banqiao (1693-1765) to his family letters. The reader will be disappointed if he takes fiction as real, and disillusionment results most often "not from seeing truth in fiction, but seeing fiction in what is real." 54 If writing is necessarily a fictional construct, then the identity of self is also a construct constituted through structures of meaning in language. A number of pieces in Wild Grass deal with the quest for a self. Yet the relation between self and language is fraught with tensions and mutual disruptions. T. A. Hsia characterizes the language of Wild Grass as "imbued with strong emotional intensity," with its "jaded and jerky rhythm." Leo Lee has interpreted its contorted language as the "crystallizations of the thoughts and feelings on the inner edge of his tormented psyche." 55 These characterizations point to disruptions in the relationship between language and self and make it

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difficult to use categories denoting a comfortable self-organization in writing. Aesthetic terms such as "symmetry" or "parallelism" do not sit well with the fragmentary features that critics have noted in Wild Grass. 56 Rooted in the aesthetic ideal of organic unity and order, these categories tend to smooth over the probings and the agonies the writer experiences in constructing a "self." They project a center of consciousness possessed by a subject who is able to direct at will his writing. Yet it is precisely the breakdown of such a self-assured, unitary subject, along with the breakdown of meaning in language, that is dramatized in most of the prose-poems in this collection. The breakdown of the subject occurs in a typical setting. Several pieces begin with some undefinable "space" with no temporal and spatial parameters: a twilight scene, a nightmare, a boundless wilderness of unnameable horror, hell, the grave, the icy mountains, and valleys. In short, it is a nowhere hardly describable with color, light, and darkness, not to mention words-a netherworld of nothingness. This "nowhere" indicates that objects are no longer "out there" to serve as supports for the constitution of the subject. In the poem "Hope" ("Xiwang"), the narrator lists some of the external "supports" that used to sustain the youth of his inner world: "stars and moonlight, limp fallen butterflies, flowers in the darkness, the funereal omens of the owl" (p. 177). These objects can no longer be enlisted as correlatives affirming the existence of a "self." Their "indifference" and impersonality recall the vault of the impersonal night sky in "Autumn Night." In the lyrical pieces, natural objects abound and are identifiable and recognizable, but with words like "dream," "hell," "nothingness," "emptiness," "death"- the words that the author uses often to express anxiety rather than refer to external objects- the narrative seems to be straining beyond its intelligible range of meaning toward the unrepresentable. When the external world is a mere nowhere, the inner world of the subject is also emptied out. It becomes a world in which the heart "is very tranquil, void of love and hate, joy and sadness, color and sound" (p. 177). Self seems to turn blank. The self so depicted is not a rational intelligence in full mastery of its faculties. Subjectivity of the self, if there is any, dissolves to nothingness. It is a "passerby" who is passing over the edges of the linguistic and cultural definitions of identity, as shown in the piece entitled "The Passerby" ("Guoke"). The passerby is a "man," but the word "man" seems to be an empty space devoid of any conventional meaning, an ablation of identity.

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The passerby comes from nowhere, has no name, but is called anything by anybody. He has been walking ever since he could remember, but he has no idea where he is going. His destination, as he finds out from an old man, is the grave. The only certain thing about the "man" is that his life is an aimless roaming that leads finally to the grave (pp. 188-94). The realization of inevitable death strikes a deadly blow to the myth of the unitary subject, who, as a source of meaning and thought, is assumed to be outside discourse but able to animate signs and language. Against the inevitable prospect of death, the subject proves to be a transient passerby, a temporary construct in language. The obsession with death in some pieces in Wild Grass can be seen as effecting a relentless demystification of the imaginary unity between writing and reality. The impossibility of constituting the unified subject is dramatized in "The Epitaph" ("Mu jie wen"), the most grisly and gruesome piece in the collection. The text describes how the narrator confronts an epitaph on a tombstone. The corpse inside the tomb is a double of the narrator, an image to which he feels attracted but with which he cannot identify. What allows the narrator to identify a meaning in the dead person is the inscriptions on the stone tablet of the tomb. The moss-covered stone tablet is crumbling away, however, and the inscriptions are fragmentary. The epitaph tells something about the dead in a narrative form, but it is a narrative of the self-torment and self-destruction of a disembodied" spirit." The spirit sees "an abyss in heaven," and in all eyes sees nothing. "There is a wandering spirit that takes the form of a serpent with poisonous fangs. Instead of biting others, it bites itself, so it perishes" (p. 202). Peeking through a gap in the tomb, as if in an act of self-searching, the speaker perceives the corpse, which is" disemboweled, its heart and liver gone," and whose face "had the inscrutability of smoke" (p. 202). The inscriptions on the back of the tombstone seem to say something about the "interior" of the corpse, which engages in an act of trying to understand itself. It tears its heart out to eat it so as to know its taste, but the agonizing pain stops it. Then it again tries to savor the heart, but it has already grown stale and tasteless. Thus in gruesome and grotesque details, the text allegorizes agonized soul-searching, a doomed effort to wrest some vestiges of" subjectivity" from a corpse. A clear-eyed insight into the doomed effort to establish a self marks Lu Xun's most gloomy pieces. This insight reveals a conscious-

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ness that may be described as the" enlightened false consciousness." 57 This consciousness takes place in a split subject who senses the ultimate futility of what it is doing but somehow still keeps doing it. Lu Xun often described his writing career as digging a grave for himself.58 But what makes Lu Xun different from the modern unhappy consciousness is that he often strained to convert this "pessimistic" vision of futility into a supreme effort to generate powerful aesthetic effects in literary and political engagement. This aesthetic effect is reflected in some pieces in Wild Grass, in which the image of death or darkness at the nadir of non-meaning is suddenly turned into "the transcendent, supreme ecstasy of life" (p. 172). Or as in "Tremors of Degradation" ("Tuibai xian de chandong"), a decaying woman on the verge of annihilation is abruptly elevated to an awesome statuesque figure wandering in the boundless wasteland, who "raised both hands ... with all her might towards the sky and from her lips escaped a cry half-human, half-animal, a cry not of the world of men and therefore wordless" (p. 206). Contemporary Chinese critics have identified such scenes of triumphant vigor as illustrative of chonggao. 59 My concern here, however, has been to demonstrate Lu Xun' s attitude toward writing and representation as willful constructs and his exploration of the difficulties in sustaining a stable self. Lu Xun' s allegorical mode of writing is a corrective to the organic conception of language as evinced in his Mara essay. Symbolic language allowed Lu Xun and his contemporaries to imagine and write the image of the Chinese nation or people, the gigantic figure of history. It is a May Fourth legacy that was developed in Communist culture. The allegorical vision in Lu Xun, by dismantling the organic symbol, functions as a critique of the sublime aesthetic. The term "allegory" refers not to a rhetorical device but to an attitude and a form of language that see the gap between sign and reality. In what follows, I show that Lu Xun's allegorical impulse found a refined artistic expression in Eileen Chang. Chang's essays and fiction display, beneath the glossy representation of the colonial experience in Shanghai and Hong Kong, a deep sense of the crisis of representation.

A Beautiful and Desolate Gesture To treat Lu Xun and Eileen Chang as fellow travelers in literature is an undertaking that would seem incongruous to a critic reared on the usual distinction between "revolutionary" and "entertainment" literature. My concern here, however, is not to write about the two in

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terms of literary schools, style, movement, and lineage along a continuous line of literary history but to look into the aesthetic assumptions that inform their uses of language and shape their understanding of writing. The Lu Xun of Wild Grass has something in common with Eileen Chang. A common skepticism toward language's ability to represent reality, a melancholy obsession with death, ruins, desolation, and the mutability of all things, a vision of history as a primordial wilderness lacking a purposeful structure, a form of writing marked by fragments and paradoxes- all these seem to invite us to bring Eileen Chang into an illuminating juxtaposition with the Lu Xun of Wild Crass. Moreover, these motifs left a rich diversity of "offcentered" aesthetic and literary forms that would be explored and developed by a new generation of writers in the 1980's. Edward Gunn defines Eileen Chang's writing as an "anti-romantic" reaction to the grand themes of the May Fourth. Rey Chow, following the lead of Naomi Schor, has focused on superfluous detail in Chang's fiction as a politically motivated aesthetic working to subvert the totalizing representation of revolution 60 These valuable insights can be reconsidered and elaborated in the light of the allegorical. The allegorical in Eileen Chang is an obsessive attention to sensuous detail, a fixation on the singular and heterogeneous. The singular detail is superfluous and hence "irrelevant" to any totalizing grand narrative. Chang declared pointedly that" all the interest of life lies in those irrelevant things." 61 Chang's aesthetic views and literary practice imply a subversive tendency that posits small homely truths as negations of grand politics. Grand politics, the main legacy of the May Fourth, rests on a representation of national unity, progress, and the ideal collective subject entrusted with a historical mission. This representation, as we have seen, is grounded in a symbolic structure of language. Chang's works can be read as attempts to fracture the symbolic unity in the direction of allegory. In her writing, the sign is turned into a self-referential artifact, into a web woven of heterogeneous images drawn from both Chinese and Western cultures. The essay "My Own Writings" ("Ziji de wenzhang") is a clear statement of Chang's aesthetic views. Most writers, she wrote, pay too much attention to the uplifting and elevating side of life. Descriptions of revolution and conflicts give the impression of power, but the beautiful is at odds with the taste for power. What is beautiful, she insisted, is sad and desolate. The desolate (cangliang), Chang's favorite word, captures her aesthetic principle. The desolate describes external

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qualities of a scene or landscape. As a mood the desolate becomes "melancholy," which, as Chang admitted, was one of her favorite English words. 62 The desolate is contrasted with the tragic and the zhuanglie, which is close to chonggao in the sense of the sublime when the reference is to heroism, history, or revolution. The sublime glorifies sheer power; the tragic emphasizes sharp contrasts, both of which are stimulating. The desolate, on the other hand, has a lingering significance and a formal structure: it stems from a technique of writing that juxtaposes disparate elements, as in the joining of such colors as onion green and peach pink. This technique Chang calls her own, by a Chinese phrase cenci de duizhao, which can be roughly translated as "uneven admixture of the disparate." The disparate elements may be superfluous or simple, true or false. Yet instead of being set up in a clear-cut contrast, they should be thrown together in a random admixture, so that "falsehood contains truth, and superficiality has simplicity." 63 A striking example of this aesthetic principle is a description of a street scene in Hong Kong after World War II. There a crowd of people, Chang included, ate with relish turnip cakes bought from a street vendor while a bluish corpse lay at their feet. 64 The sheer cruelty of the war and unabashed joy of eating jar on each other in a single glance. A much better illustration is found in the epilogue to Romances (Chuanqi), a collection of Chang's short stories. On a sunny winter morning, as Chang walks down the street after buying groceries, people, objects, smells, and sounds come into her perception. There is a wet smell in the air like that of drying clothes; there are toddlers, hawkers, a Daoist monk seeking alms and meeting cold eyes from everybody, a gossiping butcher, an aging prostitute, and so on. All this is described in grotesque detail. What Chang perceives are disjointed fragments, and there is no underlying unity to organize them into a continuous sequence. Although the title of the text is "The Day and Night of China" ("Zhongguo de riye"), the whole series is deliberately presented as a "patchwork," like the patches on the blue cotton gowns worn by the majority of pedestrians. And these blue patches are equated with the patchwork of representing "China":" As for the blue of the blue fabric, that is the 'national color' of China. But nearly all the blue gowns worn by the people in the street have patches, some dark, some light, as if washed by the rain, distinctly bluish and striking to the eye. Our China was originally a patched-up country, even its heaven was woven with patches by the Goddess Nil Wa." 65

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The patchwork is a significant image. It calls to mind the mosaics that Benjamin associated with the allegorical construct. 66 The fragments from the street also have a montage-like quality, an artistic effect that the movie-lover Eileen Chang sometimes explored in her fiction. The mosaic and the montage may throw some light on the aesthetic principle of "uneven admixture of the disparate"; both devices emphasize the fragment, and both show a remarkable absence of a unifying scheme to recoup the fragments into a whole. Perhaps this is what Chang meant by saying that most of her fictional characters are "incomplete characters." 67 This aesthetic of patchwork and fragment reveals the predicament of the individual caught in a bewildering history and painfully aware of the swift flow of time in the modern world: In this age, the old things are falling apart, but the new are yet to be born. Before the high tide of the time comes, anything that is clear-cut and definite is but an exception .... We are living in a time that is itself sinking like a shadow. We feel we have been deserted .... Between memorv and reality, there appear embarrassing incompatibilities, giving rise to a solemn but gentle restlessness, a serious but unnameable strugg!e6s Although Chang was not interested in grand themes and monumental events like revolution and reform, she nevertheless had the rare ability to penetrate into historical depths beyond the "irrelevant" fragment. She envisioned history as a process of decay and destruction, often epitomized in the images of primordial landscape, desolate ruins, and vague memories of an unapproachable past. The individual haunted by this historical consciousness finds little in the outside world to use for a symbolic identification of self and reality, because the self is also subjected to decay and death. This insight accounts for the numerous images imbued with a profound sense of desolation and melancholy in Chang's writings. In the essay" A Few Words on Paintings" ("Tan hua"), Chang discussed an image that can be taken as an exemplar of the aesthetic of the desolate. The image is from Ruined House by the French artist Paul Cezanne, one of Chang's favorite landscape paintings. Overlaid on this image are motifs of history, memory, destruction, and loss of the self. A white house bathed in the sun at noontime, which has one dark window like the eye of an one-eyed person. From the roof a big crack

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leads all the way down to the bottom. The house is trembling, as if it were laughing, laughing on the brink of collapse. A small path leading into the house is now barely visible, and all around grow uneven weeds and grass, whose colors are so faint in the sunlight that they dissolve into a haze. The sun is choking and reminds one of the poem, On the ancient road of the Capital Chang' an, the sounds and dust have vanished, vanished. Standing in the lingering twilight against the west wind, a mausoleum of the Han Dynasty. But here there is no magnificence of the past; there is only the desolation of the middle class, the ever more empty emptiness. 69 As in Lu Xun, there is the image of the look, a gaze into the house, but no reply from a corresponding intelligence is possible from the single dark "eye." Besides, the "personality" of the house implied in the metaphors of laughter and the eye seems to be one of hysteria and insanity. The past (the poem indicates the past of China) stands forlorn as a colossal wreck in twilight and faded splendor, just as the sordid present of modern men has sunk into empty ennui. In "Love in a Fallen City" ("Qing cheng zhi !ian"), the image of desolation functions as a thematic as well as a narrative element. Bai Liusu, a young divorced woman from a traditional family, tries to win the love of Fan Liuyuan, a wealthy overseas Chinese. They play a game of romance, in which the uncommitted Liuyuan tries to woo Liusu as a mistress, while the young woman tries to get him to marry her so that she can gain financial security. Their dallying is full of intrigues, petty wickedness, misunderstandings, and anxiety- the favorite themes of Eileen Chang. The battle of Hong Kong abruptly brings this game to an end by making them realize the folly of such triflings against a vast backdrop where catastrophes loom large. The central image in the story, which foreshadows the catastrophe of history, is a wall of gray bricks near the hotel at which the two protagonists are staying. One day they stroll to the base of the wall. The wall "is exceedingly high, and seems boundless. It is cold and crude, and has the color of death." 70 It is evident that the wall stands as an emblem of history as a petrified, primordial landscape, which indeed is the image it conjures up in Fan Liuyuan' s mind. This wall somehow makes me think of those words about the end of the world [Iii laotian huang, literally," the aging of the earth and ruins of heaven"]. Someday our civilization will be utterly destroyed, everything ended- burned out, crushed, and broken up. Perhaps this

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In sharp contrast to the death hue of the wall is the pretty face of Liusu, who is leaning against it: "red lips, watery eyes, a full fleshand-blood face containing thought" (p. 226). But the grim realization that this full-blooded bloom of life is nothing against the destructive forces of chance and time does not dawn on the protagonists until the war descends on them. During the battle they live in danger and fear and experience trials and deprivation. One night shortly after the war begins, Liusu wakes up with a start in the middle of night. Hearing the hoarse howling of the desolate wind, which is like the "feeble breath of civilized men deprived of memories" (p. 248), she sees again in a trance the wall, which suggests with fresh horror the utter darkness and ruins. But the wall, as well as the war, suddenly becomes a catalvst to bring the lovers into an emotional union. Nothing in this world, she thinks, is certain. "All that she could rely on was this breath in her chest and this man who slept at her side" (p. 249). She embraces Liuyuan, and in a flash of understanding the couple unite. The ending provides an ironic coda for this catastrophic vision of history: "The fall of Hong Kong fulfilled her. But in this world past reason, who knows what is cause and what is effect? Who knows? Perhaps it was just to fulfill her that a great metropolis was leveled. It brought death to thousands, brought suffering to tens of thousands in its earth-shaking reform. Liusu indeed did not feel she had any slightly extraordinary place in history" (p. 251).71 As she is thinking these thoughts, however, Liusu, "with a gentle smile, gets up and kicks the ashtray of mosquito-incense under the table" (p. 251 ). This cynical and mischievous gesture is a theatrical move typical of characters indulging in petty wickedness (xiao jian xiao huai) in Chang's stories. It suggests that irrational as history may be, it still leaves room, however limited, for the petty manipulations of the egoistic individuaL Against this gloomy backdrop, language and narration seem to be helpless moves. In Chang's apt phrase, they are but" a beautiful and desolate gesture" (meili cr crmgliang de slzoushi), whose meaning, if there is any, is posited for a moment, only to dissolve in the deepening darkness of time. 72 This may account for the often-mentioned elusiveness and vagueness of Chang's language. Her texts exude a profound sense of melancholy over the acts of writing and storytelling as short-

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lived, factitious textual constructions. Among the many metaphors she used for storytelling are ashes, smoke, burning; the sad, hoarse sound of the huqin (a bowed string instrument), the bitter and transitory taste of jasmine tea, the blurred stain of a teardrop on a letter, patchwork. The implied self-erasure and transitoriness of these images reveal the split subjectivity found in Lu Xun that gives rise to the melancholy characteristic of the allegorical sign?3 This obsession with the detail and the fragment in Chang's writing contributes to the sense of melancholy. Peter Burger observes of the melancholy in Benjamin's concept of allegory that it is "a fixation on the singular, which must remain unsatisfactory, because no general concepts of the shaping of reality correspond to it. Devotion to the singular is hopeless because it is connected with the consciousness that reality as something to be shaped eludes one."74 Made with a view to the crisis of representation in the modernist arts, this observation accurately describes the question that confronted Eileen Chang. Refusing to attribute any grand and total significance to history and reality, Chang dwelt on the minute and fragmentary detail for assurance in aesthetic contemplation. These general observations are illustrated by the story "Aloeswood Ashes- The First Burning" ("Chenxiang xie-di yi lu xiang"). One feature of this story often mentioned by critics is its intertextual references to classical Chinese fiction? 5 Edward Gunn has observed that the story has a "memorable atmosphere without creating memorable characters." 76 This impression may be a symptom of a larger and deeper tendency in Chang's work to represent characters and events blatantly as textual constructs and cultural artifacts. Like many other stories by Chang, "Aloeswood Ashes- The First Burning" plunges the reader into a dazzling profusion of details. The eye is compelled to range over a thousand and one things. Details of dress, color, decor, and interior design; details of architectural style and landscape; details of the human body and facial features- a sea of details and objects that seems to evoke a world built on sheer materiality and surface. To be sure, many details do have a narrative function in suggesting the psyche of a character or foreshadowing later events, but most are simply "there" and seem more fascinated with themselves than with anything beyond their isolated confines. In addition, the details are not plain and tangible objects in a commonsense reality. They are conjured up as textual constructs and cultural artifices. For instance, the maids in the house of Mrs. Liang

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are dressed in such a way that they are perceived as stepping right out of the Dream of the Red Clzanzbcr. Ge Weilong, the main character, recognizes her identity while looking at the details of her dress in the mirror, and this identity is established by virtue of its resemblance in dress to the literary figure Sai Jinhua. The house of her aunt is at one point perceived as having a geometrical design resembling a modern cinema and at another as a haunted house out of the Liao zlzai zhi yi stories, which is about to vanish into a huge grave mound. If these resemblances between one thing and another and between one text and another are no more than a conventional literary device, what about the human body and facial expressions? These are not treated in their flesh and blood corporeality and biological fullness of being, but are again inscribed in textual form or a cultural artifact. An interesting example can be found in Weilong' s first encounter with her aunt, whose facial features are presented as a composite of cultural product and artifice. Weilong focuses her attention on her lips, which arc rouged with a brand of cosmetics fashionable at the moment in Paris. Weilong recognizes her aunt's sleepy and sensuous eyes from an image captured in her memory of a faded family photo. Weilong's own identity is also depicted in the story as a product of a textual and cultural system. Looking in the mirror at her dress, Weilong notices that her body is dressed in two kinds of fashion. The upper part of her dress belongs to the dress code of the colonial schools of the British empire; the lower part is in the style of the late Qing dynasty. This incongruous juxtaposition is intended by the colonial authorities in Hong Kong to exhibit to foreign tourists the exotic charms of oriental girls. Weilong's body and dress are again modeled on the mixed style of Sai Jinhua. Feminine charm, a prominent feature in the story, is also measured with reference to a cultural system. It is not described, as often done in traditional fiction, in terms of floral images. Curiously, the Chinese culinary system is invoked to assess feminine beauty. When she first arrives in Hong Kong, Weilong is worried that her fair complexion, commonly believed to be typical of Shanghai women, will not match the colony's prevalent taste of beauty, for most girls in Hong Kong have olive-colored and suntanned skin indicating health and vitality. Yet her fair skin turns out to be a much sought-after quality, and many of her male classmates fall for her. If beauty or lack thereof is constitutive of a woman's identity in a patriarchal social structure, in this story feminine beauty is defined in terms of well-cooked

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dishes. "If the beauties of Hunan and Canton provinces with deep eye sockets and high cheekbones are a dish of ribs cooked with sugar and vinegar, then women from Shanghai are pork steamed with rice powder" (Xinoslwo ji, p. 281). Here feminine beauty is represented in the frame of the culinary system, which implies that beauty is not only an object for the pleasure of the eye but also a pleasurable object for the palate. Objects, things, and human bodies are not depicted in a realistic manner. Their values have to be assessed and constructed with reference to a text, a work of art, an artifact, and a sign system. In other words, objects no longer have intrinsic substance; they are seen as products or images produced and reproduced by the cultural sign system. In this sense, the story can be said to stage a world of simulacra. To say this is to claim that the sign system that designates and guarantees the recognizable sense of a "real" world no longer functions. "Aloeswood Ashes- The First Burning" depicts Chinese culture in the process of becoming increasingly colonized and westernized. With the downfall of the imperial dynasty, the traditional sign system was uprooted from its sociocultural grounds. It had become a rotting carcass and lost its former credibility. Westernization, on the other hand, had ushered in a whole new sign system, one also cut off from the totality of its cultural milieu and then superimposed on alien soil. The coexistence of two different sign systems inevitably clashed in the colonial societies of Hong Kong and Shanghai. Each tended to cancel out the other's authenticity and validity. Both became freefloating signs cut loose from their original meaning embedded in a stable social organization. The fluidity and fleetingness of the sign account for the fact that scenes, objects, and human bodies in this story are constantly presented by the author and perceived by the characters themselves as images and as nothing but images. Existence enveloped in such a web of images becomes groundless, weightless, and meaningless. The vicissitude of floating signs as sheer images is the tale of the two cities of Hong Kong and Shanghai in this and other stories. Many instances in" Aloeswood Ashes- The First Burning" attest to this free-floating character of the sign. Despite minute attention to details, images that rise up before the eyes of a character or the reader are often shrouded in mistiness and fuzziness. Weilong frequently feels that she does not stand on the firm ground, that she is on a ship

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lost on an uncharted sea. She feels a sense of drifting on undulating waves. The fluidity and arbitrariness of the sign are nowhere better illustrated than in a passage describing the imitation of the English party. Shortly after Weilong's arrival at her aunt's house, Mrs. Liang gives a party that is meant to be a copy of the English garden party. The narrator gives a detailed description of this English custom. The garden party belongs to the culture of the nineteenth-century English landed gentry. At such parties, gentlemen and ladies of noble birth gather in an estate in the country. They wear formal dress as befits the occasion and behave with proper etiquette. They leisurely stroll around the castle and on the lawns. They sing "The Last Rose of Summer" while gathered around the piano or spend their time chitchatting over tea. All these details of ritualistic regularity are depicted as belonging to their rightful context, as integral parts of the "natural" environment of the society of English gentry. These images are not perceived and felt as images, but taken as objective and natural "reality." But as soon as the party is transplanted to Hong Kong and the backyard of Mrs. Liang's house, it becomes a network of uprooted images and signs that impart a ring of flagrant constructedness: The society of Hong Kong loves to imitate English customs in every way, but it never fails to distort utterly the original model by adding unnecessary legs to the snake it is trying to draw [hua she tian zu]. Mrs. Liang's garden party was tinged with a strong native flavor. Everywhere on the lawn were hoisted five-foot-high big Chinese lanterns inscribed with the Chinese character fit [fortune]. In the twilight they were lit and cast shifting shades of light and shadow. These lanterns were like the indispensable props in the Hollywood production of The Secret HistonJ of tlze Manchu Court. Among them stood some awnings leaning this way and that, emanating Western exotic charms and looking grotesque. The maids and old servants all had the shiny, oily queues dangling behind their backs. They carried precariously on the trays cocktails, juice, tea, and cakes, bending their backs and zigzagging their ways through the forest of awnings. (Xiaoshuo ji, p. 233)

The garden party is a staged and contrived scene. It is a picture that gets painted awkwardly, a film that is shot and edited with grotesque montages of heterogeneous fragments from Western and Chinese cultures. Mrs. Liang's imitation of British custom can be read as a

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miniature of the colonial situation of Hong Kong, where signs are uprooted from their context and thrown together with signs alien to them. Objects, things, and human beings are blatantly textualized and constructed with arbitrariness and artificiality, and everything becomes filmic and graphic images-a surface of simulacra without depths of meaning. The aesthetic principle of the desolate, then, is not only a fascination with ruins, wrecks, darkness, and death but also an awareness of signs as fragments discontinuous with one another. If modernity can be defined as an agonizing sense of the crisis of representation, Chang's writing displays a strong streak of modern consciousness. The crisis of representation is a realization that language is no longer effective in referring to reality, truth, and the subject beyond the words themselves. Reality has to be bracketed and is seen as constructed by recourse to cultural resources, whether Chinese or Western. Representation is now felt as the re-presentation of an already existing representation. In this sense, representation is no longer a reference, but a reproduction of images, a mutual reflection of mirrors upon mirrors- an endless field of simulacra. In many of Chang's stories, the crisis of representation is an allegorical perception of representation as an artifice delicately and precariously papering over a yawning abyss. Chang persistently attempted to pile colorful image upon colorful image, sleek detail upon sleek detail, as if to find some solace in the thick of images. But the abyss yawns in the background, and the catastrophe waits in the wing, anticipating the unpredictable nightmares of history. The ending of" Aloes wood Ashes- The First Burning" has a compelling emblem not only for the precarious perching of the sign but also for Chang's aesthetic of the desolate. After Weilong marries and settles for a less than ideal happiness, she and her husband, George, visit a fair on Chinese New Year's Eve. There she finds some solace and forgetfulness through an engrossing immersion in the myriads of goods and curios. But beyond these lanterns and people and things there was only that cold, eternal heaven and sea-endless desolation and infinite horror. That was what the future held in store for her. The future is unthinkable, and to think is to be overwhelmed by a boundless terror. She did not have a long-term plan for her life. Only in the midst of these trivial and tiny objects and curios could her agonized and restless heart find a temporary rest. (Xiaoshuo ji, p. 337)

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Eileen Chang saw the abyss in the sky and desolate ruins on earth. Her writing is a far cry from that of the Mnrn poets but close to the mood in Wild Gra~s. If we take Lu Xun and Eileen Chang's works examined in this chapter as a testimony to history, the individual who surveys the scene surely experiences a drastic mood swing. In the triumphant march down the highway toward the brave new world of the modern nation, one is rushed on by exhilarating orchestral music (Eileen Chang's metaphor for May Fourth) that heralds the birth of a new people and raises fresh hopes. In Wild Grass Lu Xun heard the discordant notes in this torrential music. Finding the powerful music distasteful and inauthentic, Eileen Chang played a tearful yet stoic tone, turning her fascinated gaze at the ruins, the past, the grave, the haunted house, the stagnant, the feminine, and death. If modern Chinese history began as a movement to cure historical wounds, Eileen Chang seemed to be contemplating and caressing the unhealed wounds. For her and for many late arrivals haunted by history, caressing the historical wounds was a veritable, repeated literary gesture. Beneath the monumental, the spectacular, and the heroic lingers the pathetique and funereal. We will see that the monumental and the heroic became the dominant note in Communist culture and gave rise to the official status of the sublime. We will also see how these two divergent tones got entangled with the gender differences that define modern Chinese men and women, who are fashioned as heroically masculine or sickly" effeminate."

3 The Sublime and Gender The Master [Confucius] is good at leading one on step by step. He broadens me with culture and brings me back to essentials by means of the rites. I cawzot give up even if I wanted to, but having done all I can, it seems to rise sheer above me and I have no way of going after it, however much I may want to.

- Yan Yuan, Confucius' favorite disciple

In traditional Western aesthetic discourse, the sublime is a masculine mode. The classic example is Edmund Burke's well-known association of the sublime with the father and the beautiful with the mother. The father is sublime because he is authoritative, distant, intimidating, inspiring awe, respect, and admiration. The mother is beautiful because she is tender, loving, and personal, arousing love and intimacy . 1 This divide extends beyond the family to the entire cultural field and becomes a mark of sexual difference. When the aesthetic meshes with the social, even the beautiful disappears from the mother and becomes the father's property. The father is a composite figure representing law, unity, order, morality, spirituality, transcendence, and ultimately the essence of culture itself. The mother figures in an earthbound, domestic setting, bogged down in the biological details of childbearing and childrearing. The "softer virtues" of the feminine are meant to gratify the instinctual needs of man's "lower," material and sensual existence. In the paternal high court of the sublime, where qualities of virility, strength, the Ideal, unity, divinity, and transcendence reign, the feminine is an outcast, an alien, a disrupter, and an intruder. Analyzing the place of the feminine in the Western discourse of the sublime, Naomi Schor identifies a set of ideas clustered around the notion of the feminine detail. The detail is that which eludes the unifying law and grasping intelligence of the

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sublime and is linked in an ominous and rebellious sisterhood with such unsavory qualities as the deformed, the monstrous, the fragmentary, the physical, the ornamental, the decadent, the contingent. 2 But the feminine detail does not remain mute and silent. The detail, as Schor argues, militates against the production of the sublime. Thus, the aesthetic of the sublime is erected as a safeguard: the sublime "can be seen as a masculinist aesthetic designed to check the rise of a detailism which threatens to hasten the slide of art into femininity."3 The unending conflict between the feminine and the sublime can be glimpsed in many unsuccessful attempts to contain the detail in the history of Western aesthetics. This conflict has important implications for understanding gender and its aesthetic representation. Schor does not argue for a simple triumph of the feminine detail over the sublime, as in modern or post-modern aesthetics; the battle is not a winnertake-all game. The feminine detail is not a stranger or saboteur tearing down the bulwark of the sublime from outside, but a secret agent, something of a time bomb ticking away at the heart of the sublime. Indeed, it is built into the discourse of the sublime. The disruptive force of femininity is at work within the sublime expounded by Longinus, the Greek philosopher and first theorist of this aesthetic category. In reading a poem by Sappho describing her ovvn body suffering and disintegrating in an erotic frenzy, Longinus was fascinated by the strange link between the woman poet's dispersing bodily fragments and the sublime effect. 4 He tried to come to grips with the ambivalence of the poem's sublime power. The mutilated female body indicates, in Neil Hertz's words, a "shattering erotic experience" bordering on death.' In an attempt to tame the chaotic experience, Longinus argued that the shattering experience of the suffering female body was channeled into a poetic energy that organizes and empowers the poem. Hence the sublime effect. This seems to be a masculinist strategy of containment by which the raw force of the erotic is reorganized and sublimated into a poetic, sublime effect. It becomes rather difficult to distinguish the raw passion of a woman from the poetic, compositional energy that constitutes the rhetorical sublime power. With a sleight of hand, Longinus dismissed the threat from Medusa's head and imposed a reassuring story on the sublime: originating as a destructive experience, it leads to a vigorous cultural rebuilding. Longinus' strategy barely hides the fact that the sublime is edged with the feminine, if by "feminine" we mean those elements posing

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threats to the patriarchy's solidity and stability. Viewed as cultural development, the sublime is the cultural ideal toward which members of a community strive. The sublime in action is indeed a cultural process of sublimation. The etymology of the word "sublime," as Hans Loewald's useful study shows, "suggests rising to a limit or upper threshold and proceeding on a slope. Its familiar use as a noun is preceded by its use as a verb." 6 Sublimation is a transformation from a lower to a higher, purer state of existence. In psychoanalytical terms, this would mean a transformation of instinctual and libidinal energies into "higher," culturally sanctioned and valued activities. In the light of the tension between the masculinist sublime and the feminine detail, this implies that culture is a process of overcoming and sublimating the feminine. It is a constant vigil to defend against those disruptive, feminine elements. Construed as a defense sublimation seems negative, stern, and grim. Repressive sublimation is a common pattern in any culture, a source of civilization's discontents. The child's pain in growing up and the adult's endeavors at self-improvement attest to this. Sublimation can also be non-repressive and function as a releasing channel, not as a dam, for the flow of libidinal impulses. Herbert Marcuse's vision of a non-repressive civilization is based on this sort of sublimation? It is an aesthetic state in which the body is not bruised to pleasure the soul, but united with it in a higher unitary experience. Sublimation as a cultural and educational process was not news to twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals and writers. One thinks of Wang Guowei's writings on psychology and aesthetic education, Lu Xun's exploration of creation myths inspired by Freudian insights, and Zhu Guangqian's systematic account of sublimation. As a creative and expressive process, sublimation was a driving force behind the New Culture of the May Fourth movement. The most obvious example of this is Guo Morou's writing, particularly his collection of poems Goddess (Nil slzen) 8 As an analytical term, sublimation may shed light on the libidinal economy of Chinese culture. The word "economy" means the quantitative distribution of psychic and libidinal energies- the amount of freedom a culture grants to libidinal needs and the amount it withholds to maintain cultural order. 9 This perspective stamps mainstream Chinese culture as marked by a strenuous endeavor to guard against and to transform its underlying libidinal desires. Whether in the Confucian classics or in Maoist discourse, the commanding authoritative exhortations are about self-transforma-

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tion, self-correction, self-denial, and excessive instinctual renunciation for some higher collective goal. This is especially true of collective life under Communism. In the following pages, I address the interlocking themes of sublimation, gender, and sexuality in modern and contemporary Chinese culture. I argue that the ideal of the heroic individual harks back to the Confucian motif of grandeur. I take a poetic exchange between Mao Zedong and Li Shuyi as an allegorical incident representing a large cultural drive toward the heroic and masculine at the expense of the feminine. I then analyze another exchange- a dialogue between Zhu Guangqian and Liang Zongdai on the sublime. Whereas Zhu sees in the sublime sources for strengthening the masculine, Liang Zongdai attends to the feminine and turns it into a version of the sublime.

The Motif of Grandeur and Sexuality Parallels between Western notions of the sublime and Chinese preoccupations with similar motifs may yield no more than the fascination of a curio, unless such comparisons penetrate the respective cultural practices. Instead of dwelling on the sublime as a concept, it may be useful to address the culturally relevant motif of grandeur in the Chinese tradition. It has been documented that a strong interest in the experience of grandeur and magnificence marks classical Chinese aesthetics, especially when such experiences are associated with the vast sway and spectacular array of political rule 10 One vignette from the Zuo zlwan reveals Prince Ji Zha's experience of that grandeur as he listened to various types of music. After the court musicians performed the songs of the Qi state, he responded with a series of exclamations: "Splendid! ... Broad and majestic-the grand manner! The exemplar of the eastern sea- who else but T' ai-kung? Such a state knows no limits!" 11 Qi was a well-administered state and Tai-kung, the adviser to the founders of the Zhou dynasty, was reputed to be a wise, upright, and benevolent ruler. Ji Zha's response shows little of that terror Edmund Burke associates with sublime political rule. Instead, a pervasive and harmonious order showers benevolence on the people and knows no territorial bounds, stretching far and wide like the eastern sea. As an epithet for the profile of a great man, the metaphor of grandeur (da) is often associated with that of height (gao), representing lofty principles embodied by a man of high moral stature. In Confu-

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cian China, Confucius was held up as the moral exemplar enveloped in sublime aura. The historian Sima Qian's (145-90? B.C.) account of how he stood in awe of the lofty figure of Confucius may provide an illustration. Reading the Confucian classics, the historian was seized with a strong desire to experience the grandeur of the Sage in all its palpable living reality. So he made a pilgrimage to the residence of Confucius. The historian felt wonder and awe, a sense of a humbled pride mixed with a pleasure of elevation. He described the dizzying heights of Confucius as an unscalable mountain peak: High mountains one can only look up to, Grand Virtue one can hardly follow. Though one cannot attain to the heights, One will never cease to aspire.12 This brief poem seems to point to the mixture of despondency and elevation characteristic of the experience of the sublime. Not surprisingly, the metaphors of height and uphill striving have been a favorite gloss in the contemporary Chinese interpretation of the Kantian sublime, which I discuss in Chapter 5. Sima Qian's experience can be traced to a strand of thought in Confucianism itself. The tendency to render political rule and moral integrity as an experience of the grandiose and the lofty is quite pronounced in the Confucian Analects. Extolling the virtue of the legendary King Yao, Confucius exclaimed, "Great indeed was Yao as a sovereign! How majestic was he! It is only Heaven that is grand, and only Yao corresponded to it. llovv vast was his virh1e'" 13 This statement makes the political and the moral an integral part of the aesthetic of grandeur. In Confucian China, the world of politics and morality was the arena of men rather than women. Grandeur belonged to men's vigorous enterprises and moral pursuits. The aesthetic of grandeur is thus a masculine discourse. It is sustained by the notions of yang and yin, a cosmic division that undergirds the gender divide. Yang, evoking the sun, may refer to whatever is bright, strong, active, masculine, aggressive, virile, and so on. Yin, suggesting the moon, may refer to anything weak, feminine, passive, dark, or hidden. In literary criticism, which in its traditional forms was often indistinguishable from discourses of personality appraisal, the yang motif was developed into the notion of yangga11g zlii qi, a concept I discuss below in relation to Zhu Guangqian's theory. An early example of such a spirit is Mencius. As mentioned above, when asked to list his chief merits, Mencius replied that

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he was good at nourishing his vital force. The vital force is obviously a yang force, which by Mencius' account is infinitely magnificent and strong and fills all the spaces between heaven and earth. This vital spirit, a distinguishing mark of the Confucian gentleman, should be vigorously cultivated and maintained. 14 The aesthetic of yang, however, is edged in various ways with the notion of yin. Although it is customary to link yin and yang in a complementary harmony, it is my purpose to explore the threats posed by yin and the feminine to the aesthetic of grandeur. This aesthetic, whether in its traditional form or its modern variant of chonggao, maintains masculine dominance by suppressing the feminine. Confucius understands the threat from the feminine. In the Analects, the Sage seems to have difficulty maintaining a consistent, unequivocal attitude toward women. He associates women with servants and "inferior men" as opposed to morally upright, culturally sophisticated gentlemen. But even such a perfect man as he is liable to find himself at a loss when dealing with women and "inferior" men. "Of all people," says Confucius, "women and servants are the most difficult to behave to. If you are familiar with them, they lose their humility. If you maintain a reserve towards them, they are discontented" (Lunyu, 4: 73). Indeed Confucius was thrown into confusion when he met Nan Zi, the wife of the Duke of Wei, a woman reputed to have a lewd character. When his disciple Zi Lu expressed displeasure at the Master's private interview with the woman, Confucius vehemently defended the righteousness of his conduct. In an exclamatory tone of protest-a sign of breakdown incompatible with the Sage's customary moral integrity and firmness, Confucius swore, "Wherein I have done improperly, may Heaven reject me! May Heaven reject me!" (Lunyu, 2: 26). The Sage's characteristic eloquence in expounding moral doctrines failed him here. It broke down into vehement, repeated, and far from coherent denials. Confucius was an aesthetic thinker. Despite his stern moral positions, he did not reject sensory pleasure derived from aesthetic pursuits and activities. He delighted in the aesthetically pleasing and made numerous pronouncements on the importance of art, poetry, ritual, and ceremony in shaping the well-rounded personality and fostering socially appropriate sensibilities. His passion for music was proverbial: one story tells of how he was unable to savor the taste of meat for three months after enjoying beautiful music (Lunyu, 2: 40). But when it came to women's sensory and sensual charms, Confucius

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found himself in an awkward position. Although sensory pleasure can be conducive to the cultivation of men's sensibility, female charm may be too much of a temptation: it may become a passion incompatible with virtue. "I have not," he warned, "seen one who loves virtue as he loves female beauty" (Lwzyu, 2: 101). It would be nice if men fell in love with virtue as quickly and passionately as they do female charms. The Sage regretted that such ethical passion does not happen as often as one might wish. For him female charm is a dangerous lure, subversive not only of men's virtue but even of political rule. An anecdote in Analects tells of how the people of the state of Qi sent a team of female dancers and musicians to Lu as a present. The Duke of Lu loved the present so much that he stayed away from his official duty for three days, enjoying the musicians' performance and neglecting his court. Outraged by the duke's conduct, Confucius protested by leaving the state (Lunyu, 4: 78). Confucius' ambivalence toward female charms may allude to the hidden side of his character, the unconscious of his morally fortified mind. This is the realm of affects, feeling, and erotic and bodily impulses that come under the rubric of sexuality. The use of the word "sexuality" to describe certain aspects of Chinese culture, not to mention Confucius, may seem far-fetched. Rather than genital sex, however, I evoke the already broadened meaning of the term as denoting libidinal energy repressed by consciousness and social institutions. The notion of sexuality can be an interpretive tool to point to hidden, subterranean currents beneath cultural edifices. This area includes the unconscious, bodily pleasures and pains, emotional agony and ecstasy, biological experiences of sickness and dying, the sensuous union of bodies, fantasies and dreams. It would be quite absurd to claim that the Chinese, a species of a different space and time, are strangers to sexuality. Sexuality, or repressed libidinal energy, is the quicksand that any culture has to contain and divert through ceaseless sublimation. Sexuality or libidinal energy always threatens both to disrupt and to revitalize a culture. In the anecdotes cited above, Confucius seemed to sense the threat of sexuality and tried vigilantly to repress it to maintain his moral equilibrium. Sublimation may also be viewed as a ceaseless but never completed project of sexual repression. Confucius' behavior brings out some traces of precarious elements in the solemn aura surrounding a sublime figure. In modern China, the equivalent sublime figure is Mao Zedong. It has been a favorite practice in contemporary Chinese aesthetic discourse to focus

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on Mao's poems as the ultimate expression of the Chinese sublime and to eulogize Mao himself as a lofty figure of revolution. Yet despite the fanfare and sacred halo surrounding Confucius or Mao, we can still uncover the undermining elements in the drive toward the sublime. Below, I look at Mao's poems. Where critics find the revolutionary sublime, I look for what challenges and endangers the sublime. Mao's poems show how the poet as an exemplar of the revolutionary hero suppresses sexuality and can be read allegorically to provide insights into contemporary political culture. Most of Mao's poems address the grand themes of revolution, history, and the destiny of the Chinese nation and people. With what is often termed "revolutionary romanticism," they depict great military campaigns, mass movements, vast and awe-inspiring landscapes, and other grandiose themes. It is no wonder that these poems form a favorite body of texts for Chinese critics to elaborate the aesthetic of the sublime. Apart from poems on grand subjects, Mao also wrote works that may be categorized as love or "sentimental" poems. Of this type, "Let Us Be Parted Now" ("Zeng Yang Kaihui," 1923) and "Reply to Comrade Li Shuyi" ("Da Li Shuyi," 1957) are most notable. These two poems express his affection for Yang Kaihui, his first wife and the daughter of Mao's professor Yang Changji at the First Normal School of Changsha, whom Mao admired as a mentor. The couple married for love and had two sons. They obviously were happy together at the moment when "Let Us Be Parted Now" was written. As a love poem, "Let Us Be Parted Now" has to deal with the emotions and affections of a revolutionary. The poem is written, as many of Mao's poems are, in the classical ci verse form, with irregular meters and rhymes. This genre is freer than the shi verse form composed with a certain rigid set of Chinese characters and rhymes and is deemed more amenable to the expression of private, personal, and depressive feelings. Mao's poem is about parting from the beloved and thus is heir to a venerable tradition of classical Chinese poetry lamenting parting and separation, often written in the ci form. How then, does the private feeling of a revolutionary fit a genre whose expressive mode seems to be so self-pitying and "individualistic"? The first few lines clearly depict feeling and sadness: Let us be parted now, With a wave to say good-bye.

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How can we bear another moment of looking sadly at each other And showing the pain we feel? Though we blink back the tears in our eyes, Yet the tears in our hearts Stain our every gesture and every glance! 15 The poem emphasizes the motif of looking. Yet the look here is not self-affirming but stained with pain and sadness. It is from an individual who mourns an immanent loss. Stained with tears, the look also makes the bodily gestures "tearful." Is this a free and unbridled expression of the affective and libidinal? We have to find out what becomes of the emotional elements as the poem unfolds. Tears figure prominently in this passage and are worth some attention. Tears are outward signs of inward feelings, here feelings of pain; they are the bodily fluids that link the inside of the subject with the outside. Tears also blur the boundaries between the self and the other: they" overflow" the gestures and looks, even though the subject tries to keep them back. As such, the tears in the poem pose a threat to the stable, pure form of subjectivity, one mandated by the cultural ideal of personal strength and self-control. In the cultural ideal of personality, or at least in the masculinist model, tears have a lowly status and are something to be exorcised and suppressed, for they call into question the firmness of a man's moral character. As a common Chinese saying goes: "The great man sheds blood, not tears." If withholding tears is required of a great man, how much more so of the revolutionary figure who sets out to save his country. Tears are very unbecoming for a revolutionary. The poet attempts to contain the flow of tears by blinking them back, but they prove not quite controllable, staining" every gesture and every glance!" The sorrowful tears also color the scenic description in the second stanza, one that comes close to the classical poetic scene of parting. The typical emotive tenor of such scenes is a mixture of destitution, melancholy, and loneliness: This morning, a thick frost covers the East Gate Road As the fading moon dips in the western horizon, Casting its dismal light on the pond beyond. (Zang and Zhou, p. 8) This dismal scene is crowned with the final, unbearable moment of parting:

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If the poem ended here it would appear incomplete, and a sense of incompleteness would be right according to the emotional tenor of the genre. The poem of parting is not supposed to wrap everything up but should linger on a note of longing for something remote and lost, as in numerous classical poems of parting and separation. But the poet at this crucial moment makes a decision, an uplifting move repeated frequently in other poems. This poetic move can be seen as an epitome of a psycho-cultural process of sublimation in the broader field of modern Chinese political culture. The tears, pains, and sorrows-the affective and libidinal- are not allowed to remain what they are. They cannot remain superfluous, useless, and aimless as mere emotional discharge or elements of jouissance. Unserviceable to any "worthy" aim, they need to be mobilized, channeled, and sublimated into the broader and higher goals of the culture. So the "threads of sorrow" should be severed. In the final few lines, the dismal images give way to a suddenly acquired firmness and to the awe-inspiring images of Mount Kunlun (Zang and Zhou, p. 9). The revolutionary should be as strong and forceful as raging cyclones. The affective jouissance is purified, redirected, and converted into a sublime jouissance enjoyed by the lovers in the regained paradise of revolution: "And together we will soar to the highest heaven/ And frolic among the clouds!" (Zang and Zhou, p. 9). Emotion, mood, and desire are revealed and then transformed into revolutionary passion. This psychic pattern is at work in Mao's poetic dialogue with his friend Li Shuyi. Well publicized and remembered by millions of Chinese, this poetic exchange has acquired a paradigmatic sociocultural significance. Li Shuyi was a close friend of Mao's martyred wife Yang Kaihui and the wife of a well-known revolutionary, Liu Zhixun, Mao's close comrade in his early revolutionary career. Both Yang and Liu died a tragic death, arrested and executed by the Nationalists. In January 1957, eighteen poems by Mao were published in the first issue of the magazine Poetn; (Shikan). This may have signaled nothing more than a favorable party line toward literary creativity. Possibly inspired by Mao's poetic interest in publishing his own works, Li Shuyi wrote Mao a letter, in which she en-

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closed a poem written on hearing of her husband's death in 1933. The poem is obviously elegiac but written in the classical style of the genre called guiyuan, an expression of a solitary wife or widow languishing in her adorned boudoir for her absent man. Keeping to the style of the genre, Li's poem mourns her husband as an absent traveler, dwelling on her unfulfilled love and desire, her pain and her languor and longing. In the lonely bower I toss in bed long before dawn, The shadows of night touch off a sadness of separation. what is it so unbearable, that shatters my lingering dream in the morning gray? Where can I find the wayward traveler? Six years have flown by in silence, Waking up l recall the day of parting, Tears flow and soak my shirt, wet and glistening. (Zang and Zhou, p. 66) The reader familiar with classical Chinese poetry will recognize the poem's images, scenes, and words as conventional and even cliches. Yet considering the cultural atmosphere in the late 1950's, when authenticity of self-expression was rare and writing poetry was equal to shouting slogans, the poem is quite poignant and touching. The poem does not build toward the firm armor of the revolutionary character, but mourns the private and inner experience of a woman: the dim and lonely bedroom, the silent sobs, the unquiet bed, the troubled dream, the lack of erotic fulfillment, the melancholy, the shattering trauma, and above all the overflowing tears. These experiences are traumatic and painful. On the other hand, they also appear to be good material for poetic elaboration and constitute secret treasures for the poet, who had kept and cherished the poem for 24 years before she let Mao read it. Li Shuyi would have been mistaken if she had expected Mao, now the triumphant and undisputed leader of the Chinese revolution, to listen to feminine sobs and appreciate a widow's tears. Although Mao had previously written a few poems of tender and sentimental love, he had come to view them with displeasure, denigrating them as affecting "soft, tender, effeminate u tterances." 16 Mao's attitude toward the feminine in poetry is symptomatic of a general attitude toward women and the dominant conception of female gender in the new political culture. In Communist culture, women are regarded as com-

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rades of men in a common cause. Their place in the family and in affective relations, as mother, daughter, and lover and so on, is discounted. The "feminine" taste for colors, delicacy, decoration, ornaments, and the "feminine penchant for feeling and affection" are deemed superfluous in the imperative uniformity of the official aesthetic standards. A distinct feminine gender is all but invisible in such representations, which are nevertheless forged in the name of woman's liberation. Chinese >vomen should shoulder the "half of the sky" and be capable of carrying out the gigantic task of revolution alongside their male comrades. One of Mao's poems, written to gloss a well-publicized photo of Chinese women's militia, expresses in a nutshell this official masculinist aesthetic. The poem describes how the militia women, high-spirited and rifle in hand, stand with pride on the training ground and bask in the rays of the morning sun. They are seen as the daughters of traditional woman warriors like Mu Guiying and Hua Mulan, who gave up their family and personal life to engage in military campaigns in the service of the monarchy. The new aesthetic taste characterizing these modern-day woman warriors involves their shaking off their traditional feminine attire and attributes: "Look how they shun pretty dresses of satin j And don the soldier's uniform with pride" (bu ai lwngzlzuang ai wuzhuang). 17 The gender assumption implied in these lines anticipated Mao's reply to Li Shuyi's poignant poem. "Reply to Comrade Li Shuyi" (1957), which Mao wrote to Li, can be read as an imperative to transform libidinal impulses, already partially sublimated in the genre of lonely women's lamentation, into a higher, purer aim. That the poem was widely known, cited, and made into a popular song during the Cultural Revolution attests to its cultural exemplariness. The poem's original title was "Roaming in Heavens" ("You xian"). The poem departs from the earthly and domestic setting of Li' s poem to a mytho-poetic, heavenly realm, a well-loved device in the classical tradition. The surnames of the revolutionary heroes Yang and Liu are punned with the conventional poetic images of poplars (pronounced yang in Chinese) and willows (pronounced liu), moving another step up the poetic and cultural scale. The major part of the poem portrays how the martyrs soar to the ninth heaven, the highest realm in Chinese cosmology, and are welcomed and entertained by the mythical Old Man of the Bright Moon (Wu Gang) with the heavenly elixir of" cassia brew." On top of this welcoming ceremony:

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Gently waving her ample sleeves, The lonely Goddess danced across heaven's boundless stage To comfort the souls of our noble martyrs. (Zang and Zhou, p. 64) The goddess is Chang E, an immortalized woman in ancient Chinese mythology. Now the revolutionary martyrs are in the company of immortals and have attained their celestial abode and mythical status. The wine, the entertainment, the dance, the beautiful figure of the goddess with her loose and wide sleeves, display sensuous pleasures in the celestial realm. But the poem purifies these pleasures and joys by elaborating a ritualistic ambience of sacrifice, a ceremonial atmosphere that sanctifies the martyrs and re-channels the feelings of mourning into respect and worship. Replying to the manifestations of unconscious desire implicit in Li's poem, the ritualistic, sacrificial atmosphere sublimates and legitimates its libidinal contents. Again, this sublimatory process is at its most evident in the description of tears. Li's poem displays an abundance of tears, which overflow and seem to dissolve or "melt" the subjectivity of the poet into melancholy and depression. In Mao's reply the tears are transformed, passions elevated: Suddenly news of the tigers' capture reached their celestial abode, Thereupon they burst out crying And down came a deluge of joyful tears! (Zang and Zhou, p. 64) The capture of the tigers refers to the Communist victory over the Nationalists- what the martyrs di~d for. Tears are plentiful, but they are joyful, ecstatic, and euphoric. They are celebratory, honoring the founding of a new national community. The shedding of tears now is part of a worthy and noble cause: the victory of the Chinese revolution and the affirmation of political identity. The tears are politically informed and culturally sanctified. They are no longer merely bodily liquids, useless, gratuitous, superfluous, sinking an individual into sadness and despondency. They no longer belong to a single private individual, a sorrowful woman or widow lamenting helplessly in a lonely bedroom, but are collectively shared, shed, and enjoyed. They now take on a sacred, religious value and produce uplifting effects.

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The su blimatorv process in Mao's poem may be viewed as the sublime aesthetic in action. It is a miniature of the psycho-cultural operation of the official aesthetic mode in Maoist China. The sublimatory process, as I have noted, is predicated on an implicit distinction of gender What is to be sublimated can well be placed under the traditional rubric "the feminine." The lofty apex of sublimation, on the other hand, is commonly assumed to be the" masculine" domain- the building of a nation, revolution, vigorous endeavors, and cultural achievements. In these grand enterprises, Chinese women are either systematically written off or viewed as subjected to masculinization. In Mao's poems and his exchange with Li, we see that the libidinal and affective are offered up in sacrifice to a certain grandiose and larger collective goal. Mao's slogan: "What men can do, \'\'omen can also do," is an official imperative of this psycho-cultural pattern, although the larger cultural goal may be a "sexless collectivity" rather than simple masculinity Is

Versions (1- tlze Sublime: Zlzu Guangqia11 and Liang Zongdai fll'O

The eighteenth-century concept of the sublime, as it evolved from John Baillie to Burke to Kant, is aligned with a number of qualities deemed unique and exclusive to man. Qualities such as grandeur, uniformity, spirituality, virility, belligerency, abilities of abstraction, and so on are considered manly and at variance with a whole set of "feminine features." 19 The feminine qualities arc grace, ornament, sensuality, softness, affect, domesticity, bodiliness, and many others. In the light of the male desire to dominate in the field of politics, these feminine features appear to be fragmenting and dispersing, and have been named by Naomi Schor "the dispersed detail." Although the association of the feminine with the detail is a product of masculinist prejudice, the feminine detail is a shoal on which the sublime runs aground and a figure that can be used to subvert the sublime edifice of patriarchal culture. The sublime becomes a doubleedged sword when aligned with gender differences, as occurs in Chinese interpretations of the Western sublime. When Chinese writers approach the sublime with certain assumptions of gender, the sublime leans either toward masculine power or toward the disturbing threats of the feminine. Zhu Guangqian and Liang Zongdai' s dialogue provides a dramatic example of the engendering of the aesthetic. Zhu in-

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terpreted the Western sublime as an instance of masculine power, corresponding with the Chinese notion of yang and yanggang zhi qi. His theory was taken to task by his friend Liang Zongdai. By arguing that the sublime can also be aligned with the feminine and the sexual, Liang Zongdai was working toward a modern version of the yin aesthetic. As the foremost Chinese aesthetician in twentieth-century China, Zhu Guangqian (1897-1986) did more than anybody else to systematically introduce the Western sublime and assimilate it to the Chinese aesthetic matrix. In his essay "On the Beauty of the Strong and the Gentle" ("Gangxing mei yu rouxing mei"), a chapter in his influential Psychology of Literature (Wenyi xinli xue, 1936), Zhu sought to align the sublime with the idea of the strong or gang and the concept of the beautiful to the notions of the gentle and soft or rou. Zhu claimed that all types of beauty in the world could be encapsulated in the two sets of images taken from classical poetry. The first, representing the beauty of the strong and the powerful, reads "The stallion, the west wind, and the austere north" ("junma, qiufeng, jibei"). The second, representing the beauty of the soft and gentle, is imaged in "Apricot blossoms, spring rains, and the south of the Yangtze River" ("xinghua, chunyu, jiangnan").20 Zhu should be credited for picking these two lines out of the vast corpus of classical poetry. Both lines are overloaded with cultural ramifications. The first line conjures up military battles on horsebacks and the harsh wintry weather in north China- traditionally the breeding ground for tough, manly heroes. The second line evokes the soft, pleasant spring season, graceful and charming, bringing to mind the fertile regions of the Yangtze River Delta. This is proverbially a place known for its beautiful women and sensual pleasures. As conventional tropes, the two sets of images symbolize masculine qualities on the one hand and feminine attributes on the other. Zhu cited the classical male heroes Xiang Yu and Cao Cao as epitomes of the masculine, militant quality, and Lin Daiyu, the most important female character in Dreams of the Red Chamber and the archetype of the feminine, as the embodiment of the beauty of the soft and gentle (Meixue wenji, p. 227). The aesthetic tradition Zhu invoked to clinch his point is long and persistent. From the cosmic divide of the yin and yang, Chinese aesthetic thinking has derived a wide range of qualities and concepts involving gender. These qualities line up in such a way as to approach

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the distinction behveen the sublime and the beautiful in the West. In The Twenty-four Categories of Poetn; (Ershi si slzi pin), Sikong Tu (837908) described three categories denoting a dynamic sublimity: the potent, the strong and the sturdy, and swaggering abandon. In opposition to these, he named such qualities as the delicate and rich-lush and the close-woven and dense. 21 The eighteenth-century critic Yao Nai elaborated on the distinction and captured this tradition in compelling images. I have heard that the Tao of heaven and earth consists in nothing but the yin and the yang, the gentle and the strong .... If one has obtained the beauty of the yang and strong, then one's writing will be like thunder, like lightning, like a long wind emerging from the valley, like lofty mountains and steep cliffs, like a great river flooding, like galloping steeds; its light like brilliant sun, like fire, like fine gold covering iron; and compared to human beings, like one leaning from high up and looking afar, like a monarch receiving homage from a multitude of thousands, like one fighting against ten thousand brave warriors aroused by drums. If one has obtained the beauty of the yin and gentle, then one's writing will be like vapor, like mist, like secluded woods and meandering streams, like ripples, like water gently quivering, like the sheen of pearls and jade, like the cry of wild goose disappearing into the silent void; and compared to human beings, like one deeply sighing, or mentally far away and wrapped in thought or warmly happy, or sad with changed countenance. 22 The first set of images recalls the sublime qualities elaborated by Edmund Burke, the most salient being the military and political images. The sublime or the yang is seen in the gigantic stature of a monarch, lording it over the multitudes and standing aloof from them. The second set, with the exquisite delicacy of texture and lines, the gracefulness of movement, shady elusiveness, melancholy sighing and so on, points to the feminine. Zhu Guangqian claimed that the second set of images refers to a kind of beauty that is" feminine" (Meixue wenji, p. 231). Zhu was close to the traditional gendered aesthetic. The hidden face behind these soft images is indeed a woman, if we check the similar imagery in Sikong Tu' s poetical category of xiannong, the delicate and rich-lush. The images under this concept are depicted as if emanating from or at least consonant with the grace and sensuality of a beautiful lady. Brimming full, the flowing waters; Lush and leafy, springtime stretching far.

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Secluded in a deep valley At times see a lovely lady.23 Emerald fills the peach trees, Breeze and sunlight on waters' banks. Willows shade the curves in the path, Gliding orioles are close neighbors. To make East meet West, Zhu Guangqian equated the yang with the sublime and the yin with the beautiful. In Western aesthetics, the sublime, "with its foundations in pain, terror, vigorous exertion, and power is the masculine aesthetic mode." 24 Zhu Guangqian found the same as he looked at the Chinese tradition. Zhu's translation of "sublime," xiongwei, foregrounds the gender dimension. Xiong literally means "male/ masculine"; wei means "high," "lofty," or "towering." For Zhu these two characters exemplify what is implied in the Kantian sublime. Wei, he stressed, corresponds to Kant's mathematical sublime, denoting endless series and infinite space. Xiong, on the other hand, captures virile vigor and power, and closely overlaps with Kant's dynamic sublime (Meixue wenji, pp. 231-32). The theory of the sublime and the beautiful is often a thin aesthetic veil masking the power balance of sexes; this is also true of Zhu's theory. With a penchant for freezing complexity in a single telltale image, Zhu sought to personify the sublime in a male figure and the beautiful in a female. For him there were sublime artists and beautiful artiste;. Sublime works flow smoothly from the grand personality of the creator. Michelangelo is a sublime artist, whose sculptural work David and re-creations of scenes from Genesis on the Sistine Chapel ceiling exhibit gigantic spectacles, overweening ambitions, superhuman will, and Herculean strength. Nobody and nothing in Michelangelo, claimed Zhu, suggest a woman; even the images of Eve and the Virgin Mary appear to be heroic or epic (Meixue wen;i, p. 229). Leonardo da Vinci, on the other hand, is the typical artist of the beautiful. Nothing measures up to the standard of beauty like the charming eyes and the faint and mysterious smile of Mona Lisa. What makes da Vinci remarkable is his ability to capture lasting beauty in a woman. Even Jesus Christ in the Last Supper exudes an aura of the feminine: he is the very image of passivity, compassion, and benevolence. "Where can you find the prototype of this image of Christ except in a tender mother nursing her sick child?" (Meixue wenji, p. 230). Zhu Guangqian's division of the sublime and the beautiful along gender lines is not just an echo of the sublime with a misogynist ori-

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entation. 25 Zhu articulated in a cross-cultural perspective the discursive practice active in the Chinese aesthetic tradition and still active in modern China. The lofty image of Confucius and the sociocultural process of sublimation, which I discussed above, also point to the politics of gender within the aesthetic of the sublime. Confucius' lofty image is sustained by a vigilant and misogynist banishing of what is deemed feminine; the grandiose image of the Communist hero relies on an unceasing masculinization of woman through political sublimation. Modern Chinese history supplies a footnote for this valorization of the sublime. Since the mid-nineteenth century China has been a tragic scene of invasions, defeats, humiliations, wars, traumas, upheavals, and crises. Starting from the May Fourth cultural reforms in 1919, the pressing agenda of modern Chinese culture has been to accommodate tradition to the pressures of modernity .26 The urgent need to keep one's body and soul together in the unending national and cultural emergencies has thrust into prominence an aesthetic that values action, power, grandeur, and adventure. The sublime or any selfaffirming, self-empowering strategy has been a much-needed and repetitive literary and cultural practice. It is no surprise that for more than half of the twentieth century the sublime has been privileged over the beautiful, the potent poetry of the yang favored over the soft melody of the yin and soft. Narratives of epic campaigns and monumental historical movements have been elevated over works describing tempests in a tea cup, domestic affairs, effeminate sensibility, or the frailty of human emotion. One contemporary critic goes so far as to say that the sublime is the Zeitgeist of our age, embodying the fundamental spirit and rhytl>m of our times.27 This aesthetic mode, however, has been maintained at the cost of aesthetic diversity and a humanely enriching cultural environment. Moreover, it has been elevated as an instrument to suppress the feminine and by implication Chinese women. In this light we can read Liang Zongdai's (1904- ) refutation of Zhu's theory as rich in potentials for a subversive project and working against the grain of the dominant aesthetic mode. In "On the Sublime" ("Lun chonggao," 1934), a rejoinder to Zhu Guangqian's chapter on the beauty of the yang and strong, Liang questioned almost all the images and artworks that to Zhu represented feminine beauty and turned them into a source of power. To my knowledge, Liang's essay on the sublime is the first theoretical attempt in twentieth-century China to relate the

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feminine to a conception of excessive libidinal energy and political empowerment. Some of his aesthetic motifs anticipated new themes in the iconoclastic literahue of the post-Mao era, a literature aimed at a massive dismantling of the grand narrative of Communist ideology. Unlike Zhu Guangqian, a philosopher with a bent for abstraction, Liang approached the sublime as a sensitive poet. He sought to assess the aesthetic quality of literature and art through intense, intimate experiences and spontaneous bodily responses. This approach allowed him to value the sensory and imaginative faculty of the mind in understanding the sublime. The Kantian sublime unfolds as a drama between reason and imagination in which the imagination is sacrificed to assert the superiority of reason. 28 Liang took this idea to task, along with Zhu' s unquestioned acceptance of Kantian ideas. He wrote that Kant cannot be allowed to have the final word on the sublime. Much depends on one's "subjective" responses. Reading Kant's Critique of judgment, Liang felt that the sensory images that Kant evoked for the sublime were just as crude and simplistic as ones that the German philosopher used in his earlier treatise on the subject.29 For him Kant's imagistic illustrations did not live up to his theoretical power. Liang could not help feeling-he was quite right in view of the much noted asymmetry between imagination and reason in the sublimethat Kant's faculty for thought was much stronger than his aesthetic sensibility. To appreciate the sublime, Liang suggested, one should not start with abstraction and concepts but should immerse oneself in actual works of art. In his reading of actual works of art, Liang reversed Zhu's view of the sublime as a masculine mode. Zhu considered the Mona Lisa and the image of Christ in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper as the quintessential embodiment of the beautiful and feminine. Where Zhu found beauty and grace, however, Liang discovered the mystery, the riddles, and the abysmal that seem to play around the faintly smiling face of Mona Lisa. When you gaze into the face of Mona Lisa, Liang wrote, "what captures and absorbs your heart and soul is her mystical, mysterious and soulful smile, more mysterious and inaccessible than the hazy snow-capped mountains and unfathomable caves."3o The same transcendent mystery and unfathomable profundity mark the figure of Jesus Christ in Last Supper. Christ is the very incarnation of enlightenment and compassion. [His] brows are slightly lowered; there is no despair, no sadness; there is only a bright serenity, earnestness, and tenderness. The seri-

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The image is not at all, as Zhu claimed, that of" a tender mother nursing her sick child." The epithet "beautiful" pales before such a powerful image. The only appropriate term for it, Liang exclaimed, is "divine" or" sublime 1" 32 Following the Nietzschean distinction between Dionysian and Apollinian art, Zhu Guangqian suggested that the sublime, with its violent movement and vigorous agitation, is Dionysian, whereas the beautiful is Apollinian. Zhu cited Beethoven's Third (the Eroica) and Fifth symphonies as illustrative of sublimity and the Moonlight Sonata and Symphony no. 6 (the Pastoral) as representing the beautiful (Meixue wenji, pp. 228-29). Admitting that both Symphonies nos. 5 and 6 have gigantic power and "rev'italizing force," Liang nevertheless located the sublime in the slow-moving, languish adagio of the Third Symphony, usually referred to as the "Marcia funebre" (the Funeral March). Liang characterized this movement in terms that resonate with the traditional Chinese vocabulary of the yin and the feminine. The rhythm or tone of the Funeral March, he said, "is extremely slow and heavy; it drops and drips, off and on, like a long sigh, like disconnected sobs, like the heavy and languishing footsteps of the funeral marchers. No, it is just like the water dripping from the aged walls of an unfathomable and obscure grotto, drips and drops that sink into the innermost recesses of your heart." The feeling inspired by such music is an abject "sadness mixed with awesome terror"feelings, Liang concluded, that belong precisely to the art of what Yao Nai called yin and feminine. Yet of such music we cannot but cry out "sublime" (in English in the original text).33 Liquids, flows, sobs, grottoes, funerals-quite a few symbolic ingredients go into the making of the deeply fascinating and terrifying feminine Other-other to the sublime subjectivity elaborated by various masculinist accounts. Liang's grim picture evokes that "quivering jelly which is elaborated in the womb," as Simone de Beauvoir terms it; that cavernous, enclosed, shadowy recess of the mother's womb, "secret and sealed like the tomb," a space shot through with languor, abjection, peace, and death 34 This is a place not animated by con-

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sciousness and unredeemed by the subject, a treacherous stumbling block where the sublime subject, whether of the individualistic ego or of collective revolutionary action, falls from the lofty position of master of the universe and propeller of history to the chaotic shadows of the feminine. Liang proved most modern as well as mythically ancient in his evocation of the sublime quality of the ocean together with the unutterable darkness of feminine images. The ocean is one of the most universal of maternal symbols, manifested in the myths of various cuihues as well as modern psychoanalysis. Freud described the child in the maternal fold as an "oceanic self," which Lacan has extended into the notion of hommelette. Psychoanalytical studies have shown that the oceanic "self' swims in the libidinal flows of the maternal embrace and has not differentiated itself as a sexed subject.35 Liang's interpretation of the sublime resonates with such conceptions. What is sublime about the sea, Liang wrote, is not the raging waves and mountainous tides. To the contrary, the blue and calm surface of the sea is much more touching to our souls. Citing a Western writer, Liang wrote that the calm and shining sea invites us to gaze into its unfathomable depths. Therein we see many dizzying and vertiginous recesses, many inextinguishable desires, mixed with pains and regrets. If terror-in this case the terror of unconscious chaos-is indispensable to the experience of the sublime, the calm of the sea is most sublime.36 The terror is that of the feminine. Liang seemed determined to find the sublime in the yin and the feminine. In direct opposition to Zhu's theory, Liang claimed that even though woman is often considered the epitome of the gentler kind of beauty, the sublime can also be applied to her. This is not because women may sometimes display virile strength or accomplish the same heroic feats as men, like the well-touted traditional woman warriors Hua Mulan and Mu Guiying. Rather, the sublime of the feminine comes from the sudden collapse of our normal perceptual standards. The beautiful and sublime differ only in degree, not in kind. A normally pretty face fascinates us, allowing us time and leisure to appreciate and contemplate it. But if a woman's beauty is stunning, we are thrown off balance, shocked and disconcerted. We are dazed, and our minds race wildly 37 For Liang, both the feminine and the masculine can attain a sublime status and give rise to dizzying experiences. What is required is that they rise to the immeasurable and the unthinkable. Whether it is

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Mona Lisa's unfathomable smile or Moses' and David's awesome comportment symbolizing integrity, strength, and courage, an aesthetic experience deserves to be called sublime as long as it transports us beyond our normal, socially constructed self; as long as it "freezes the mind and dissolves the body." 38 In turning the tables on the male patent on the sublime, Liang cast a glimpse into the abyss and stared into the vast resources of power in the feminine tradition, both Chinese and Western. His theory anticipated much in the cultural production of the late 1980's that aimed at debunking the official, masculine mode of the sublime.

4 Desire and Pleasure in Revolutionary Cinema In revolutionan1 films, senson1 pleasure has meaning only wizen it successfully leads to ideology. In otlzer words, in new Chinese films after 1949, beneath tlze apparent display of pleasure flows a current of political discourse that guides the audience. This is tlze major feature and tlze effect of tlze revolutionanJ, Third World cinema in New China. - Ma Junxiang, Chinese film critic

Liang Zongdai' s view of the sublime exults in an unbound and anarchistic abandon of libidinal energy unharnessed to any cultural program and political purpose. A marginal strand in modern Chinese culture, this aesthetic arose as a reaction to the ever-tightening and narrowing of passion and energy in Communist culture in the wake of May Fourth. By "tightening," I do not mean that Communist culture represses and rejects exuberant passions. In a way Communist culture courts exuberant passions rather than rejects them. Far from repressing the individual's psychic and emotional energy in a puritanical fashion, Communism is quite inclined to display it-with a political sleight of hand. It recycles the energy, as if it were waste products or superfluous material lying outside the purposive march of history, by rechanneling it into transforming the old and making the new individual. This method launches individuals on the way to a more passionate and often ecstatic state of mind and experience. Communist culture aims not just at changing the old society; it also engages in fashioning the right kind of character, constructing revolutionary subjectivity, giving birth to the new man of the future. In this regard, the emotional dimension of the individual has to be taken into ac-

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count. Emotion can be appropriated to enhance rather than diminish political identity and effectiveness. Thus, an intense emotional exuberance marks Communist culture. With glorious fanfares and passionate flourishes, the culture's artistic and literary visions depict the individual who embarks on a revolutionary career. Through trials and errors, the initiate ascends to the lofty position of the subject of history. It is in the recycling of the individual's libidinal energy for revolutionary purposes, in the constant displacing of the individual's life and enjoyment into revolutionary experience, that we find politics working in close concert with aesthetics. This is a feature of Communist culture often neglected by dismissive observers and critics. I use "displacing" in its full psychoanalytical sense. To displace the inc!ividual's libidinal energy into politics and revolution does not necessarily mean replacing it with something completely different or getting rid of it. It can mean that politics acquires an experiential richness and intensity, assumes sexual connotations, becomes a full-blooded life world, and revolution affords personal satisfaction and fulfillment. In this way, politics becomes aestheticized; following Slavoj Zizek, we can say that one can enjoy the things of politics-one's nation, class, race- as oneself. Within this seamless blending of the private and collective lie the traps as well as the lures of Communist culture and revolution.l "Enjoy your nation as yourself." 2 Nowhere is this politico-libidinal pleasure in Communist culture truer than in the audiovisual experience offered by revolutionary films produced between 1949 and 1966. Taking as its subject matter the revolutionary experience before 1949, the revolutionary film was artistically and politically privileged over other filmic genres. Tremendous collective efforts and artistic ingenuity were put into the production of these films. In transforming individuals into revolutionary subjects, the revolutionary film enjoyed a great advantage over other cultural forms and institutions. In its visual impact, its sweeping representational power, its emotional appeal, and its social and geographical reach, the revolutionary cinema functioned as the most effective apparatus in the Communist endeavor to build a mass political culture, which \Vas directed toward producing an identical political consciousness and affording collective enjoyment. I will offer some reflections on the revolutionary film and as illustrations take a close look at Song of Youth and Nie Er. Instead of propa-

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gating revolutionary ideology, the revolutionary film draws on the audience's emotional sources to make a strong aesthetic appeal. In Song of Youth, the notion of a progressive, party-directed history is interwoven with an individual narrative of Bildungsroman, giving the impression of affective fulfillment and self-empowerment through participation in collective enterprises. In Nle Er, sexual love is assimilated and sublimated into revolutionary and nationalistic goals, but love, or desire in general, is not simply displaced out of existence. It is interfused into the emotional texture of the revolutionary film.

The Indzvidual in History Contrary to popular assumptions, Chinese films made before the Cultural Revolution had a strong entertainment appeal. Entertainment is, of course, tied to politics: film production in China is an affair of the state. One telling example is the ritualistic presentation of films as a birthday present to the state. In 1959, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic of China, filmmakers produced a large number of works and presented them to the young nation. These works include, among many others, the well-known Song of Youth, Lin Zexu, and Nie Er 3 Films honoring the state call to mind the all-toofamiliar connection between the film industry and politics. It is a commonplace that all centralized powers in the twentieth century have been interested in the production of films. Shortly after Hitler took power in 1933, the Nazis started to subvert the cinema apparatus of the Weimar Republic and immediately established a ministry designed to control film production 4 Two days after the former Soviet Union was established, a special section for film was set up in the State Commission on Education 5 To link film with politics has often led to a simplistic view of film works, and other forms of art for that matter, sponsored by an authoritarian state. One frequently hears this view in the critical dismissal of blatantly ideological films. Yes, one may jeer at the works of art that are part of the state's political agenda as second rate and not worth a second glance. Yet this hasty dismissal turns a blind eye to the historical fact that Chinese revolutionary films had a tremendous and indelible emotional impact on audiences. Premised on a notion of art as gloriously transcendent and free from politics, this dismissive view could lead us to ignore the unique artistic patterns and aesthetic features of a film work closely allied with politics. It is precisely these

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aesthetic features that add flesh and blood to revolutionary ideology -ideology aestheticized. It is instructive to evoke a Western parallel. The French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has alerted us to a less simpleminded, if more sinister, link between the aesthetic and political in a stream of aesthetic thought in the West running from Plato through Hegel to Nietzsche and Wagner. Bringing this tradition to bear on Nazism, Lacoue-Labarthe argues that politics, especially totalitarian politics, does not simply appropriate art for propaganda purposes. There is a form of politics that is essentially a form of art. The model of National Socialism, Lacoue-Labarthe argues, is total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk). For him, the Wagnerian Festspiel of Bayreuth constitutes an aesthetic self-expression of the German people and provides the audience with a representation of "what they are and what grounds them as such." Understood in this way, politics is not merely about power struggles but is a matter of expression and representation, taking over the aesthetic business of building images, constructing identities, erecting symbolic structures, and creating emotional ambience. Politics so conceived does not go outside its own territory to borrow from the aesthetic; rather, it is "instituted and constituted" in and as a work of art. 6 This conception of the aesthetic-political nexus alerts us to many neglected and disconcerting questions, such as the massive attraction of totalitarian rule, the rallying power of the leader, the emotional effect of ideologically blatant art, and the willing sacrifice and loyalty of millions of individuals to the political regimes that victimize them. Lacoue-Labarthe's description seems to resonate with Chinese experiences. Art and literature under Communism were proverbially political and served the dominant ideology. Mao's "Yan'an Talks," a speech of scriptural status in Communist culture, dictates that artists and writers should serve the revolution and the people. Yet even with Mao's strictures, art and related aesthetic experiences did not simply stand in a subordinate relation to politics as mere means to an end. I intend to explore some subtleties of this relation by examining revolutionary films. Among the many genres of Chinese films, the revolutionary film, which depicts the course of the Chinese revolution before 1949, best illustrates the concerted work of aesthetics and politics. Two related themes inform the genre: a conception of history and a picture of the individual's growth into a staunch revolutionary soldier. These two themes correspond to the official vision of modern

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Chinese history and to ideological imperatives about the individual's involvement in this history. Revolutionary films helped keep alive various versions of modern Chinese history more powerfully than did novels and history books. I have occasion to elaborate on this history at various points in this book. Briefly, this history invariably begins with the tragic and traumatic sufferings of the Chinese under the double weight of feudalism and imperialism. The victims as well as the agents of this history- the People-then become enlightened about their plight and victimizers and are mobilized by the messianic Communist party to become the driving force striving to salvage history and themselves from the darkness. The revolutionary history is epic, futuristic, and always victorious in the end, because it obeys the presumed iron necessity of the historical rush toward the Communist utopia. Although the revolutionary film depicts spectacles of class struggle, mass campaigns, and military battles as the gigantic manifestations of history, the vast sweep of historical movement is often cast as a personal story. One aesthetic feature of the revolutionary film is to narrate history in the form of individual biography. This is not to suggest that the historical and political appear in biographical guise only to liquidate and swallow up the individual in the process. The dismissive criticism of the genre often stresses the disappearance of the private individual, with all his or her unique personal traits of gender and idiosyncrasy, into the undifferentiated masses- the dreaded" collectivization of the self." This criticism, privileging the self in its supposed autonomy and denigrating the collective in its faceless oppression, fails to consider the fact that even a collectivized self can still contain a "sense of self" in its apparent experiential fullness and intensity, however self-damaging that actually might be. The contour of revolutionary history is indeed embodied in personal experience, but this experience is also presented as an intimate psychic process of growth and maturation, a politico-cultural initiation, an acquisition of revolutionary identity, and indeed a process of sublimation. Historical narrative here is integrated with the narrative of the Bildungsroman. Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi gc) best illustrates this double discourse of history and the individual. The process of the film's production revealed its ideological importance to the culture under Communism. Even at its prenatal stage, the film was a nationwide cultural event. The well-known novelist Yang Mo wrote the script from her

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own novel of the same title, which was eagerly read and discussed by readers; the making of the film was supervised by the Ministry of Culture, under the watchful scrutiny of the media and the public; it was directed by Cui Wei, both a high-ranking cultural bureaucrat and an established movie star. When completed, the film was a tremendous success with audiences at the ticket office and won enormous critical acclaim 7 Although the film takes the revolutionary past as its subject matter, it is one of the few films made before the Cultural Revolution that depicts intellectuals as positive characters. Unlike other films about intellectuals, who were always suspect in the eyes of the Maoist government, Song of Youth escaped criticism during the Cultural Revolution.s The film's flattering view of intellectuals is at odds with the more customary eulogies of heroic workers, peasants, and soldiers. Its political inviolability and cultural pre-eminence are thus puzzling, and the question arises: How did the film present intellectuals as exemplary and get away with it? The answer may be sought in the project to fashion the new man, an educational program intertwined with the aesthetics of sublimation. Intellectuals, more than anybody else in the official class analysis, are in need of thought reform. But not thought reform as mere indoctrination. Some facts in the life of director Cui Wei may give clues why a certain image of the intellectual was acceptable. Commenting on Song of Youth, Cui Wei talked about his intense emotional identification with the main female character, Lin Daojing. Like Lin, he had witnessed the tumultuous and bloody period of the anti-Japanese movement; he understood her despair, her mental conflicts, her fruitless searches, her joys and sorrows. Lin's path, he said, was the one that he had traveled. 9 Critics have noted in Cui Wei's career a perfect fit between the artist and revolution: his artistic career was not part of his political career: his art was his po1itics.l 0 This was so even when intellectuals and artists came under criticism and persecution during the political purges. Whereas other directors and artists worried about how to toe the party line, about what kind of art to create so that their work and person might survive unscathed, Cui Wei always seemed confident that his political impulses would spontaneously translate into fitting artistic expressions.11 The smooth linking of art and politics in Cui Wei's career hints at the interface between the aesthetic and the political, the hidden connection between libido and revolution, individual and history. This

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link is dramatized in revolutionary films through the private plotline that often embodies the gigantic onrush of revolutionary history: the coming of age of the individual, the experience of a man, or, more likely a woman (more of this later), who, standing outside that history, grows from a nameless "nobody" and matures into personhood, into the political identity prescribed by the revolutionary history- the subject of history. The narrative of Song of Youth follows Lin Daojing's development from a lonely and helpless young woman into a revolutionary fighter and party member. The history of her plunge into revolution covers the period 1930-35. This time of deepening national crisis is the period most frequently depicted in revolutionary films, because of its potential for emplotting an initially tragic but eventually triumphant story line. But here the external history serves only as a catalyst for the more psychologically motivated plot of personal growth. In a brilliant study of the film, the critic Dai Jinhua notes that it begins with the solitary, helpless image of the protagonist in search of meaning and fulfillment and ends with a gigantic mass rally. The film's first segment presents Lin's suicide attempt when she is in despair after fleeing an arranged mercenary marriage and a sexual threat from a man. A series of shots depicts a raging sea under a low-lying overcast sky filled with ominous clouds. A tracking shot follows Lin as she walks toward a cliff overhanging the sea. Close-ups of her face describe hesitation, mental struggle, and despair. This is the beginning, low-keyed, tragic, and traumatic. In sharp contrast, at the end of the film, Lin Daojin stands aloft on a train waving the raging masses to action, a towering, stunning image of a revolutionary leader. 12 The initial series of dismal images conveys not just Lin's possible death but a traumatic experience that calls into question the possibility of being a person, of sustaining a self. In the clutches of a patriarchal society that treats her as mere sexual "plaything," she is a "nobody." But outside that society and separated from any human relationship she finds herself in a wilderness, with nowhere to lodge her emotion and desire. Lin's helplessness can be read as an allegory of the prevailing predicament of May Fourth women, who found themselves at a loss after breaking away from the traditional family to seek personal freedom. It raises again Lu Xun's question in reference to Ibsen's A Doll's House regarding the fate of Chinese Noras: "What is Nora to do after she leaves home?'' At this point in the narrative, Lin is both physically and spiritually homeless- hence, the images and

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scenes that are visual equivalents of death feelings, feelings of separation and abandonment, and chaos and destruction. She is indeed an exile in the wilderness, outside history. In the closing scenes, however, Lin emerges as a "self' that merges into many other selves, forming a gigantic collective. She becomes powerful by being attached to the massive collective, which grants her identity, gives her life and meaning, and secures her emotional attachment and fulfillment. The collective seems to enable her to exercise to the full her energy and to fulfill her desire. Such scenes of mass gatherings occur so frequently in works by Cui Wei that Dai Jinhua characterizes them as the "Cui Wei ceremony." We have seen touches of such celebratory scenes in Mao's poem to Li Shuyi. This is the apex of sublimation, the collective goal to which all libidinal energies and impulses are directed and channeled. The mass gathering is also a privileged scene in many other revolutionary films and indeed a frequent real life event in Maoist China. The Cui Wei ceremony, by representing an individual being engulfed by a collective, does not necessarily suggest the rise of the hero and the death of the individual. The hero belongs both to others and to him- or herself; this is at least the visual and emotional effect of these scenes. The hero, backed by a collective, seems more powerful, more energetic and vigorous, more confident; his or her very being and action are redolent with meaning, value, and hope. If we resist and detest such scenes as mere propaganda, as pictures of coarseness and fanaticism, we need to remind ourselves that the valued delicacy, refinement, and sophistication of the much-vaunted individualism are often the results of the separation of the individual from society in a certain historical period, rather than transcendent values in themselves. Song of Youth stages Lin Daojing's growth as a process of education. Education is evident and stressed in the act of reading books that first introduce her to revolutionary discourse. One sequence of the film shows her studying books by progressive Soviet writers recommended by the student leader and party member Lu Jiachuan. As she spends the night reading and studying, close-ups show expressions of joy and inspiration on her face, and the background fantastically changes from winter to spring. When she looks out the window, she perceives and rejoices in the glorious, flower-filled spring scene, a projection of her enlightened mind. More important than revolutionary books is the living history it-

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self. Throughout the entire film, Lin Daojing is thrust into one situation after another in which she has to witness events of great political import: the Japanese invasion as seen by the defeated soldiers of the Nationalist army, a student demonstration against the nonresistant government, and the activities of the revolutionaries. The living history is embodied by a number of card-carrying party members, who act more as exemplary models for Lin Daojing than as rich, rounded characters. In his analysis of the revolutionary film, Paul Clark writes that its central heroes "share a righteous conviction that their cause will triumph, a belief that allows gestures of revolutionary nobility."13 The hero's absolute confidence may obscure the more important motif that I have called, following the critic Meng Yue, the "narrative of Bildungsroman" in a revolutionary film: the aspiring for and striving toward heroism.l 4 In Song of Youth, the heroes, the already certified heroes if you will, do not change much in the course of the film's plot; they are not psychologically dense and interesting. Their function is not to show how great they are but to display their exemplariness for the prospective candidate, the hero in the making. The established heroes do not need a story; their story is already told: theirs is the underlying history of the Chinese revolution that finds embodiment in themselves. What the film requires is rather the candidate's story, which tells of Lin Daojing' s initiation into a place in revolution and interpellation into the subject position of history. The narrative form of this initiation is the Bildungsroman. Here the historical narrative is a prop for the personal narrative and the superhuman heroes are mentors for the main character- and for millions of viewers. To tell the story of a hero's becoming, the film stresses Lin's position as witness to history and evolves a corresponding technique to bring out her perceptual subjectivity. She is put in situations in which she can witness all the important political events as they unfold. The scene in which during a train ride to Beijing Lin first encounters the students' anti-Japanese campaign is a striking example. The protesting students rally at the railroad station to take a train to Nanjing to petition the government to fight. There are shots of students shouting slogans, of student leaders deliberating on the next move and arguing with the police, of students lying on the rails in a suicidal attempt to stop the train. All this is presented as if happening within Lin Daojing' s purview: She first hears the slogans offscreen and then steps off the train to watch the demonstration. The camera switches back and forth between the mass activities and close shots or medium close-ups

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of Lin Daojing, accentuating her admiring eyes and inspired facial expression. In this short sequence of 23 shots, five are devoted to the depiction of Lin's perception. But Lin's perception does not encompass all the ongoing activities. The film presents occurrences much larger in scope and scale than she can take in visually. In addition, the events and activities have a momentum of their o·wn and are narrated by the authoritative camera. Lin's first impression of the events is hearing offscreen voices shouting slogans, something external, not assimilable to her perception. Several scenes at the railroad station are shot physically beyond Lin's field of vision. This is both literal and symbolic. The events are manifestations of the historical narrative, narrated by the film's omnipotent and authorial narrator and happening without her. She is only an observer and witness, not yet a participant in these eventsnot until she joins the party and becomes actively involved in revolution. These repeated close-ups stressing Lin's perception form a recurrent aesthetic motif of the film, and simulate a receptive perception while implying the externaL impersonal momentum of history. The point is that Lin Daojing, as a representative Chinese intellectuaL is an observer of historical spectacles.

Aestheticized Politics Via Sexuality Lin Daojing' s growth is another case of sublimation of libidinal energy into revolutionary ideals. This raises the question of gender and sexuality. Recent scholarship on this area often associates gender and sexuality with the private, the personaL individuality, desire, and femininity. At the opposite pole are political terms like politics, revolution, or nation. Because of the deep post-modernist distrust of anything totalizing and grand, critics are inclined to see these political entities as abstract and indeed oppressive institutions or practices set against the marginaL the private, the feminine, and the libidinaL culminating in the victimized figure of the individual. Playing one set of terms against the other, the typical argument in this mode tends to lay bare the insidious strategies whereby a hegemonic cultural practice represses desire. In her perceptive study of revolutionary literature, Meng Yue analyzes the vicissitudes of gendered elements and woman's desire in Song ofYoutlz and in the various versions of The White-Haired Girl (Bai m.ao nii). She reads the successive revisions of the story of The White-

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Haired Girl as a progressive erasure of the vital issues of gender and sexuality and a transformation of these into the abstract and impersonal (read repressive) positions or subjectivity of class and nation. In the original folk-opera version, the protagonist Xi' er still has a fullblooded sexual and female body she can call her own. But in the film and then in the ballet version, Xi' er becomes more and more a sexless political metaphor representing the oppressed class rather than a woman capable of pregnancy and childbirth. For Meng Yue, this is a process of disembodiment and desexualization, in which the private is suppressed under the public, the feminine neutralized into the political, and sexuality pre-empted by the collective. A similar line of reading also runs through her analysis of the novel Song ofYoutlz in the same study. Yang Mo's novel, as Meng Yue has reminded us, evokes the gender-specific convention practiced by young woman writers in the May fourth culture. This convention features a narrative of Bildungsroman and a focus on a woman protagonist "seeking freedom and eventually making choices between her ideal and her gender role." 15 But in the novel this psychologically rich and gender-specific convention is once again hijacked by an allsubsuming party discourse of state and nation. In other words, Lin Daojing's desire is being revolutionized: her sexual orientation now hinges on her political allegiance, which determines who, among those in the range of the sexual options divided by political lines, is worthy of her love. She becomes attracted to a party member as the object of her love and disgusted with her former, egoistical husband. Unique as it is, Meng Yue's analysis seems representative of numerous readings of Chinese literature and film within the framework of gender and sexuality. Much as I am in sympathy with such readings, I find myself wondering why, with all the desexualization and disembodiment that dries up the blood and freezes the limbs, Communist literature or any repressive hegemonic discourse can exert an emotional impact and have a hold on our imagination? Where does sexuality go after repression? If unconscious wishes never disappear, even under the strictest censorship of consciousness and social repression, and will always find some clandestine way to vent itself, how does the repressed return in Communist literature? Meng Yue touches on this question when she describes the way Xi' er regains her lost gender and sexuality: "When the Red Army and Communist Party appear and take over the village, Xi' er miraculously regains her sexuality. Her once invisible female body reappears. Her lost beauty and

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youth are restored, her white hair turns black again, and her living space changes back from the wild mystery temple to the house of marriage. She is a woman again." 16 Meng Yue dismisses this rather heartwarming scenario as another myth, the myth of women's liberation, and associates it with the myth of nationalism. I propose another possibility. Sexuality, as we need to remember, does not simplv denote some instinctual and somatic forces seething under the repressive cover of consciousness. It is the psychic representation of the instinctual and somatic. Sexuality emerges out of, but is cut off from, pure biological needs. The sucking infant after being fed is the classical example: the infant seems to derive more pleasure from fantasizing over the finger, a substitute for the mother's breast, than from physical contact \vith it. This understanding of sexuality abjures a strict dichotomy between bodily energy and social repression, a dichotomy that views sexual energies as resembling the production of steam by a generator. When blocked up, the energy explodes and produces harmful consequences for the body. Sexuality is culturally orchestrated. Private and intimate as it is thought to be, it may be polymorphous and can assume public forms in finding outlets and fulfillment. The real question thus is not the sacrifice of sexuality, but how and how much sexuality is manifested. If we read the other way around, not in terms of politics versus sexuality, but in terms of sexuality in the guise of politics; if we pay attention not just to sexual politics but to political sexuality, we may be able to trace some deep psychic roots of Communist culture. Despite its puritanical surface, Communist culture is sexually charged in its own way. High-handed as it is, Communist culture does not- it cannot, in fact- erase sexuality out of existence. Rather, it meets sexuality halfway, caters to it, and assimilates it into its structure. Communist culture was attractive to some extent precisely because it incorporated sexuality. Song of You t/z is a study of how politics becomes intertwined with sexuality. Sexual love between man and woman is given considerable treatment in the film. The film's opening segment depicts the love between Lin Daojing and her first love, Yu Yongze, a student at Beijing University. Their relationship- a violation of the traditional form of heterosexual contact- is presented in charming romantic images. After Yu rescues Lin from her suicide attempt, they take frequent walks on the beach on glorious sunny days, recite Shelley's poetry, and enjoy each other's company. This is a "song" of the romantic, individualistic aspirations of the May Fourth generation.

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In the following segment, the film appears to describe how their "romantic" love dwindles into domestic trivia. What is at issue, however, is the shift in Lin Daojing's affection from the self-seeking Yu to the public-spirited revolutionary Lu Jiachuan. The film hints at the hidden love growing between Lin and Lu. Lin meets Lu at a students' party on New Year's Eve, which is devoted to protests and discussions of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. Yet an undercurrent of sexual desire runs through the politically charged scenes. A number of shots show Lu' s eyes meeting Lin's, and frequent close shots reveal Lin's admiring gaze on Lu as he talks to the gathering. In contrast to the earlier "public" scenes of discussion and argument, their subsequent conversation, after everyone is gone, is intimate, subdued, and fraught with suggestions of a growing affection. A medium shot reveals the two in a frame in which they sit in a symmetrical arrangement. The scene is awash in red; in the background three red candles are burning; to the sides of the candleholder stand two glasses, halffilled with red wineY Rather than concealing love under the gray cloak of revolution, the film exudes an air of sexual desire. After Lu is arrested and dies a revolutionary martyr, Lin's love is given a more sublimated treatment. The scene is the romantic setting of a lake in the former imperial park, the well-known Bei Hai Park, where Lin has an intimate tete-atete with a girlfriend, her female confidant. When asked if she is already a Communist party member, Lin replies that if she is, she "would be the happiest person in the world!" This is followed by a scene depicted with sprightly, lilting cadences. She takes her companion's hand, and in another shot the two girls quickly run down the stairs of an arched bridge of white marble; accompanied by a quick, lively stream of piano music, the girls display an ecstatic, girlish delight in their anticipation of happiness. This "happiness" is given obvious sexual meaning in another series of shots. To her girlfriend, Lin recites a poem, a love letter in verse by Lu Jiachuan, which expresses his passionate love for Lin and his longing for their mythical union in the sunny garden of a utopian future. The implicit understanding between Lin and her girlfriend is that Luis now her "new love." The love, though for a dead person, is not neutralized and rendered bloodless by politics; it parades its ecstatic intensity and passionate flamboyance. The failure to see this is an inability to see love and pleasure beyond the heterosexual relation, an inability to discern the sublimated forms that private desire can take in public, political,

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and apparently nonsexual guises. Desire, as we have learned from psychoanalysis, does not become fixed on one object; it is wont to roam over a wide range of choices, both external and internal. Classical heterosexual love is only one variety of the forms that desire can take. It is produced by the social institution of the family, and from the early object choice of one's own body (as in autoerotic desire) to the mother's breast to significant other persons (of both sexes) and all the way to abstract ideals and images, desire runs in manifold meandering and forking courses of displacement and sublimation. Genital sex, which is often mistakenly equated with sexuality, is only one development among many other varieties of human erotic life. When the revolutionary film addresses love, it is love of a different kind. In the revolutionary film, real images of love and affection are not to be found in depictions of sexual love between man and woman, even though such images are not wanting. But downplaying sexual love does not eliminate its broadly sexual implications or libidinal intensity. By the end of Song ofYoutlz, Lin Daojing's love seems intensified and expanded. The most compelling spectacles in the revolutionary film are the scenes of warl!l family relations, the emotional bonding of comradeship and brotherhood, the festive conviviality of the revolutionary collective. The image of a huge revolutionary family replacing the numerous small families of tradition frequently culminates, in the ending of the revolutionary film, in the ceremonial and festive collective gathering- the Cui Wei ceremony that Dai Jinhua has analyzed. This ceremony may swallow up the particular individual into a "faceless" collective, but it is also presented as a rebirth of the individual within the community, a reassertion of his or her capacities, identity, and desire. As DaiJinhua writes, "Giving up oneself to revolution means not only getting a glorious new life and obtaining the meaning of existence, but also taking a final departure from loneliness, weakness, and helplessness, and acquiring a new home, new affection, new concerns, and new power." 18 Rather than directly transmitting revolutionary doctrines or ideology, the ceremonial collective spectacle in the revolutionary film functions to unite members of the revolutionary community in an intensely shared emotional ambience and enjoyment. It is a fantasy of a total harmony of society and the individual that glorifies these spectacles, even in war films. The films [about wars] devote much greater space to the life of peace during wartime: the festive enjoyments in the liberated area, the fish-

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and-water inseparability between the army and the people, the mobilization before the battles, and the joyous gatherings and camp life after the fighting. These scenes are lively and passionate, full of fun and humor, brimming with song and laughter. They present the army, the revolutionary rank and file, and the liberated area as a huge closely knit, harmonious, happy family. It is the shelter that protects the weak and the small, the refuge for the wanderer, a paradise on earth, and the home for all the suffering people. It was the only haven and the only garden in the old China.l 9 Fantastic or imaginary as this may be, such spectacles function to forge a link more profound and stronger than any social bonds based on ideological indoctrination. Karl Marx painted such utopian pictures when he spoke of communist workers' enjoyment in each other's company when they gather for practical political purposes. The pleasures of smoking, drinking, eating and the joys of association and conversation take over the political agendas of instruction and propaganda in such gatherings. These activities are not "inter'!sted" in the sense of being mere means for achieving some immediate goal; rather, they are "disinterested" in the sense of forming a community as a pleasurable whole- an analogy to the pleasurable experience of a work of art.2° The communal pleasure is grounded in a libidinal or "aesthetic" bonding, and this is, I believe, what lies at the heart of the spectacle of the gathering in the revolutionary film. Slavoj Zizek approaches this aesthetically oriented ideology by emphasizing the emotive character of ritualistic practice. He contends that the bond linking members of a national or ethnic community always implies a shared relationship toward enjoyment, an enjoyment structured by emotion and fantasy. He speaks of a nation or a given political community as a pattern of feeling and enjoyment derived from communal rituals. "A nation exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through national myths that structure these practices." 21 It is not the case, as commonly assumed, that an abstract discourse of belief, ideology, or doctrine comes to be materialized in the aesthetic features of the communal ritual. It is not the grand National Cause that gives rise to the ritualistic performance and enjoyable effect, but the very effects of enjoyment that help project in the collective mind an imaginary prior cause. Here is a reversal of the order of cause and effect in the relation of art to politics, and the aesthetic to ideology. The aesthetic embellish-

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ments and effects- here the enjoyment of rituals- turn out to be the cause that produces its own effect- the aesthetic experience. To have faith in one's nation is to have one's faith affirmed by that of others and to have an emotional investment in the faith of other members of the national community; it is "believing that I'm not alone, that I'm a member of the community of believers. I do not need any external proof or confirmation of the truth of my belief." 22 It is this dimension of communal enjoyment and mutually reciprocal belief that accounts for the recurrence of communal rituals in the revolutionary film. Since the viewing of the revolutionary film was also a public ritual in China's mass culture, this aesthetic-political nexus explains the medium's emotional appeal, its power to generate fantasy, and its role in the fashioning of political consciousness and sentiment.

Love and Myth of the Nation Revolutionary ideologies in Chinese films have played a large role in shaping the collective unconscious and the national identity of contemporary mainland Chinese. But more than ideology per se is needed; what is needed is emotionally charged ideology, or, in other words, aestheticized politics. The film Nie Er is a case in point. Retelling the genesis of the PRC's national anthem through a biography of the composer, the film stresses the themes of nation and the revolutionary state. Although Western critics at an international film festival considered it quite formulaic, 23 the film was a success with the audience despite its ideological blatancy and gave rise to enormous emotional responses on its debut in 1959 (China Cinema Press, Nie Er, pp. -110-15).

How does this "didactic" film create its emotional effects? What artistic measures and cinematic devices does it use to convey official ideology? In the following, I discuss some aspects of the narrative structure and the montage of Nie Er, and by linking these to the aesthetic experience of the audience, I show how the film sublimates and converts erotic impulses into revolutionary passion. I further inquire into the particular aesthetic ideology at work in the revolutionary film in general and its psychic mechanism in interpellating the viewer into revolutionary subjectivity. As a biographical narrative, Nie Er describes the personal experience of Nie Er from the time the fledgling musician arrived in Shanghai to 1935, when the party sent him to the Soviet Union to study mu-

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sic. The problem confronting the filmmakers was the difficulty, given the brief time and narrow scope of this personal story, of expressing the grand themes of politics and the state. A realistic and detailed account of the musician's experience and career would exhibit the rich and often idiosyncratic charms of a romantically spirited individualthe qualities popular legend had accorded Nie Er. But such a narrowly personal narrative would lack historical breadth and political weight. In the words of a critic, the problem is "how to represent an epoch through representing an individual" (China Cinema Press, Nie Er, p. 415). It is a matter of how to write a grand historical narrative through a microscopic focus on a personal history. On closer inspection, however, the problem is more apparent than real. The choice of Nie Er, the composer of the national anthem, as the film's protagonist was obviously an ideologically inspired choice, if "ideology" means an established system of shared beliefs rather than the truism that everybody has his or her own ideology. The dominant ideology of modern Chinese history has framed the way the individual should stand vis-a-vis the history of the nation. As the composer of national stature, Nie Er is a convenient way of showing the individual as part of history. More important, his musical career parallels the political campaigns of resistance to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (kangri jiuwang). After Manchuria fell into Japanese hands on September 18, 1931, all Chinese felt the impending danger of becoming slaves of the Japanese. There were desperate calls to mobilize the masses to resist Japanese encroachments on North China. Over the next few years, a turbulent stream of parades, demonstrations, protests and rallies converged into a huge and long-lasting mass movement. Although the campaign was a spontaneous grassroots movement, it has been appropriated in official history as part of the revolutionary movement led by the Communist party for the liberation of the nation (minzu jiefang yundong). The history of the People's Republic, in the official version, did not start on October 1, 1949, but can be traced to a number of popular movements and events in modern Chinese history since the 1840 Opium War, which form a continuous red thread. The relief on the Monument of the Revolutionary Heroes at the center of Tiananmen Square illustrates this unbroken continuity. The figures portrayed range from peasant heroes who resisted British invaders to soldiers of the People's Liberation Army who laid down their lives for

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New China. !\evolutionary films never tire of searching for the embryos of Communist China in earlier history. Not only was New China conceived in the campaigns of resistance against imperial Japan, but it can also be found in the patriotic sentiments of young students expressed in the tearful and nostalgic song "On the Songhua River" ("Songhua jian shang") in Song ofYoutlz. From peasants' spontaneous rebellions, as in the film The Saga of the Flag (Hongqi pu), to the hand-to-hand fighting between the fishermen and the well-armed British soldiers in Lin Zexu, one can discern a progressive awakening of the people and the steady growing of the fetus of the People's Republic. What runs through this continuous line are the endeavors of the Chinese revolution that Mao laid down: anti-imperialism, antifeudalism, and anti-bureaucratic capitalism (the Nationalist government). This guiding thread of history would culminate in a new state, where the people are the masters of the body politic. To make the image of Nie Er carry the themes of state and nationalism, therefore, the filmmakers described his participation in the anti-Japanese campaign, his development from a private "self' into a collective "self' engaged in the movement of national liberation, and the qualities that made his personal experience embody the collective experience. Like many other revolutionary films, Nie Er follows a narrative line that moves from the individual to the collective to the state. Nie Er, under the guidance of the party organization, transforms himself from a romantically impulsive music lover to a committed member of the anti-Japanese campaign and a mature revolutionary musician. The apex of this transformation is the composition of "The March of the Volunteers" ("Yiyong jun jinxing qu"), later adopted as the national anthem. This narrative also has its psychic dimension: it traces the mental transformation of Nie Er from a contingent, insular, and aimless individual to a subject dedicated to the cause of the nation. Interwoven with this psychic process is a narrative of love between Nie Er and his female friend and colleague Zheng Leidian. This thread, erotic at times, surfaces to varying degrees in the film, intertwining itself with political concerns and thus creating a unique psychic process. The love beh\·een Nie Er and Zheng Leidian is represented implicitly in the early parts of the film. It takes the form of reminiscences of past experiences in a trance, and N ie Er' s love for Zheng is suffused with a dreamy aura reflecting the intensity of unconscious desires. The recollection is set in a domestic setting. One summer

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night Nie Er and his neighbor Lao Jiang are taking the air on their balcony. In the enchanted air of the summer evening, there float from the street down below the sad songs of a singing girl. Nie Er and Lao Jiang fall into a conversation about their past experiences. Nie Er wonders if Lao Jiang is waiting for his wife to return; this implies the sexual direction of his mood. A little later, he picks up his yueqin (a guitar-like instrument) and starts to play a folk song of romantic love from a region in Yunnan, a place full of romantic and exotic associations. A close-up shows the facial expression of Nie Er as he lapses into a semiconscious reminiscence, and the film fades into the scenes of recollection. We see the exotic and subtropical beauty of his hometown, his middle school, the performances he stages with Zheng Leidian to celebrate the victories of the Northern Expedition Army. The rhetorical features here have touches of hallucination and dream. The device of fading in and out of the recollection allows Nie Er's memory traces to surface spontaneously. Predominant are the musical and visual images, as in a silent film; the spoken word is kept at a minimum. The center of the recollected experience is a scene in which Nie Er and Zheng Leidian are acting and singing in a play, and she is obviously the fixated image of Nie Er's desire. There are political signs, to be sure, such as the images of the Northern Expedition Army, but the whole episode, on the strength of its dreamy representation, overpowers the political elements and constitutes a cluster of images fueled by desire. But love is only an undercurrent in the film's narrative, and it is constantly replaced and sublimated through ideological representations. The love between Nie Er and Zheng Leidian alters as their relationship changes. In the beginning, Nie and Zheng are friends and lovers. As Zheng directs Nie to write music for the masses and antiJapanese politics, she becomes his guide to the revolutionary movement. Later, Zheng is sent to the Communist base area in Jiangxi and joins the Red Army, her political identity far exceeding her role as a lover. She now shuttles between the revolutionary base and Shanghai, urging Nie Er and other artists to engage in artistic activities as part of the armed struggle carried out in the rural areas. Finally in Nie Er's imagination she strikes the figure of a brave soldier deeply engaged in battle, inspiring him to compose the "March of the Volunteers." Thus Zheng Leidian starts as an object of romantic desire but ends as a revolutionary mentor. Nie Er' s feeling for her also undergoes a psychic purification in the direction of politics: his private sexual passions

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are sublimated into a powerful creative energy that allows him to write revolutionary music. One episode portrays a turning point in the trajectory from erotic desire to ideological imperatives. In the scene Zheng Leidian returns to Shanghai from the revolutionary base. The director uses the short j reverse short device to represent the exchange of feelings between the lovers. This device connects shots by having things or people in one shot viewed from the angle of someone in the succeeding shot. This device has the effect of concealing the presence of the camera and allows the viewer to be sutured into the identity of the characters. In presenting exchanges of glances between the characters, it enables the viewer to empathize with the flow of feeling between them. In this episode, Zheng returns to Shanghai on an errand and is to meet with left-wing artists, including Nie Er. It begins with the artists preparing a dinner for the arrival of Zheng, while Nie Er, uninformed, wonders who is the late guest. The arrival of Zheng is signaled by the dramatist Kuang \;\lentao, who looks out of the frame and announces the guest to the party. This shot then cuts to a close shot of Nie Er. A classic shot/ reverse shot here expresses the exchange of gazes and feeling between Nie Er and Zheng. 1. Close: Nie Er turns around and can hardly believe his eyes.

2. Cut to medium shot: the guest is Zheng Leidian. She has completely changed. Her dress appears to be plain and simple.... Her bright eyes betray vague traces of past passions. 3. Cut to close shot. Nie Er rises in pleasant surprise. 4. Cut, trailing shot. Zheng quickly walks up. (China Cinema Press,

NicEr, p. 207) Those present must be looking toward the incoming Zheng, but the camera focuses on Nie Er's gaze. Zheng's appearance is introduced from his perspective. The description of Zheng in the medium shot is invested with Nie Er's emotive coloring. Only he can discern the "vague traces of past passions." Zheng's gaze is also directed at Nie Er. The combination of shots here creates a spontaneous communication of eye contact and feeling between the long separated lovers. Thus when a trailing shot follows Zheng, who hurries up toward the right side of the frame, the viewer naturally expects her to walk toward Nie Er. But surprisingly she approaches Su Ping, the party representative in the artists' circle. Nie Er occupies a secondary place in the frame. Zheng first talks to Su Ping and then turns to Nie Er.

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This series of shots is laden with political motifs. Zheng assumes several roles and bears several meanings. She comes from the revolutionary base and appears well seasoned by the rough military life, almost grown out of the romantic traits of a high school student. Coming to Shanghai on an errand, she serves as a narrative intermediary linking the left-wing cultural activities in the Nationalist-controlled cities to the armed struggles led by the Communist party in the country. As she tells the artists about the artistic activities in the Red Army and sings a folk song popular among Red Army soldiers, she brings a new ideological imperative to the city-dwelling artists: art and literature must serve the national liberation movement led by the party. As Zheng's political identity escalates, her relationship with Nie Er undergoes a change. Although there is still a hint of lingering passion, she now has been transformed from a simple lover to a mentor in Nie Er's music career. As something of a muse of revolution, she encourages Nie Er to channel his energy into revolutionary goals, converting private passions to an outburst of music creativity for revolution. One result of her inspiration is shown in the next episode, when Nie Er observes the hard life of harbor workers and composes an opera representing the workers' rebellion, entitled "Storms on the Yangtze River." This narrative sequence indicates that the lovers' reunion is more political than libidinal. With the figure of the party representative predominant in the frame, ideological motifs have taken over the erotic undercurrents and began to transform private passions into political enthusiasm and creativity. Compared with the earlier scenes of reminiscence, this segment betrays only an inkling of the erotic: libidinal energy is being placed in a political framework, private desire redirected to political purposes. Turning the erotic to the political and overcoming libidinal impulses in order to rise to the politically sanctioned subject-position may imply a heavy-handed psychic repression injurious to the individual. While this may be true in real-life China, it is not the case with Nie Er, nor with the revolutionary film in general. One of the strategies of the revolutionary film, often overlooked by critics, is to avoid depicting the negative, self-inflicting, puritanical tramping of the individual's libidinal needs. The revolutionary film seeks instead to depict the positive and the upbeat and to play up emotional exuberance and uplifting passion. While redirecting passions and drives to ideologically acceptable goals, it also allows for a certain measure of libidinal satisfaction and emotional fulfillment.

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The well-known episode that takes place in the Long Hua Tower affords a dramatic illustration of this sublimatory process. Zheng Leidian meets Nie Er to say good-bye before going to the revolutionary base. At one point Zheng fails to control her feelings and falls into Nie Er' s arms; this is followed by a shot of the two interlocked in an embrace. These shots were quite unusual even in films made before the Cultural Revolution. But Zheng Leidian's emotional outburst is not represented as a straightforward, "pure" expression of sexual love; it is again overlaid with political motifs. It is helpful here to compare this love scene with similar scenes in the films made in the 1950's and early 1960's. The depiction of romance between men and women is not uncommon in the films of this period, and love scenes often take place in a soft, poetic, serene, and romantic ambience. In the Song of Youth and Early Spring (Zao chun er yue), for example, romantic lovers are often placed in settings such as seashores and lakeshores clothed in twilight, or sum1y days of spring and moonlit nights. They may be boating on a quiet lake and reciting poetry. Such love scenes show the residual influence of romantic films made in Shanghai in the 1930's and 1940's. The love scene in Nic Er is a departure from this pattern. The directors chose a setting that is open and high up- the Long Hua Tower. The original script called for a skyscraper in downtown Shanghai. The idea was that Zheng would approach from a distance, dressed in red, and fly like a red dot into Nie Er's sight. But it would have been difficult for someone atop a skyscraper to spot a tiny red speck in the midst of the street crowds, and the plan was abandoned. Probably an unconscious motivation was also at work here, since the skyscrapers in Shanghai are symbols of the imperialist powers and colonization. Thus Long Hua Tower, an architectural structure located outside metropolitan Shanghai and distinguished by traditional Chinese characteristics, was chosen as the setting. The episode opens with an upward-angle shot of the Long Hua Tower, stressing the tower's dignity and loftiness. The shot is intended to give the impression, the director said, of" a pillar supporting the heaven, rising all the way up to the clouds" (China Cinema Press, Nie Er, p. 287). After Nie Er and Zheng Leidian meet in the tower, Zheng tells him that she is going to the revolutionary base to participate in the first Chinese Soviet Congress. This remark pulls the thoughts and feelings of the characters into a political frame: how they feel and think cannot now be separated from politics. Excited and

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thrilled, the two step out onto a balcony, and with their shoulders touching and leaning out slightly over the handrail, they survey the distant landscape of the country. A very long shot reveals what they see. The script describes the landscape thus: "In the distance, the Huangpu River flows like a golden ribbon in the morning sun. The green fields spread like carpets, crisscrossed with small paths. Houses and buildings of different heights undulate on the horizon" (China Cinema Press, Nie Er, p. 158). The open vista and the beautiful landscape typical of the area south of the Yangtze River inspire the lovers. Meanwhile, the emotionally charged landscape leans toward an more explicit ideological message. The very long shot of the landscape is made with a downward camera angle and indicates the subjective vision of Nie Er and Zheng Leidian. The camera pans slowly to imitate the surveying act of the characters' perception in an attempt to cover the entire visual field. This device stresses an all-encompassing and controlling perception, a power that seeks to embrace the vast landscape into the subject's purview, possessing it as it were through the eye. The visual possessiveness further implies a desire for ownership in a political sense. The landscape embodies, in a cliche often imbued with a patriotic undertone, the "rivers and mountains like a beautiful piece of brocade" (jinxiu heshan) and is the future property of the people's state. Nie Er and Zheng Lei dian articulate this well-defined political message in their exclamations. Looking over the fields, she announces, as if she were now the master of earth, that the Chinese Soviet Republic will be born shortly and that "all Chinese will be happy." Nie Er excitedly waves his hand across the whole landscape, exclaiming, "What we get is the entire world!" (China Cinema, Nie Er, p.158). The characters' intense emotion about the landscape thus fleshes out the theme of the state. This heightened emotion prepares the way for the venting of private passions dramatized by the ending of the episode. On hearing the shrill sirens of police vans carrying prisoners, the lovers withdraw into the tower for safety. Thinking some of their comrades are among the prisoners, Zheng flies into a rage. Unable to control herself and brimming with tears, she cries, "How I wish I could destroy this dark regime in a peal of thunder [a pun on her name]!" No sooner does she blurt out these words than she falls into Nie Er's arms in an embrace. In a timid voice, she confesses her passionate love for him. Thus by expressing her politically oriented passions, she is also given an avenue for expressing her heartfelt love.

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Both are expressed with intensity. The episode completes a psychic process of sublimation, in which the erotic is redirected and converted into a political frame of reference and private passions become intertwined with revolutionary sentiments.

Imaginan; Identification and Aesthetic Ideology To return to the more general question: How does the revolutionary film convey ideology to viewers? Is it nothing more than a vehicle or outward ornament for ideology? Is ideology simply "dressed up" in aesthetic forms? There is some truth in the view that the revolutionary film is formulaic and schematic. By juxtaposing images into a montage regardless of "natural" perception, film has a strong potential for articulating conceptual notions and well-defined ideological messages. The revolutionary film is justly faulted for its tendency to overuse this cinematic capability. The ending of Nie Er is a good example. Instead of being true to the events of Nie Er's life and closing with his death by drowning, the film depicts his departure for the Soviet Union, a journey filled with fresh hopes and plans for the future. The filmmakers attempt to build a statuesque portrait of our hero, as he contemplates the receding shorelines of his beloved motherland from aboard a departing ship. But as if this were not enough, they add a more grandiose segment with a series of shots unconnected in narrative time and space. Accompanied by the powerful music of the national anthem, the soldiers of the resistance army in Manchuria gallop on horseback over the ice-covered land, the Red Army crosses the Lu Ding River, the Eight Route Army fights the Japanese invaders, the peasants revolt in a forest of raised torches and hoes; the People's Liberation Army captures a city; and the victorious Army marches down city streets welcomed by crowds of residents. Finally, the film dissolves to a gigantic parade in Tiananmen Square celebrating the founding of the People's Republic, with Mao's huge portrait hoisted at the center. This montage delivers a message loud and clear: Nie Er's music has inspired and continues to provide impetus to the people in their revolutionary drives. The national anthem embodies the spirit of this gigantic epic of a nation in the making. The dissolving transition between the shots gives the impression that we are turning the "pages" of a history; the music affords a continuity to these unconnected shots- a continuity that implies the irrevocable advance of history. This montage sequence would be incomprehensible without

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reference to the dominant ideological discourse about the destiny of the Chinese people and nation. This mythically conceived montage is an extreme case of the type of films intensely preoccupied with ideology and utterly indifferent to the sensuous complexity of lived experience. The didactic urge of such films finds a telling expression in a mistake made by Sergei Eisenstein, who believed one can convert the theoretical notions expounded in Karl Marx's Das Kapital into cinematic images. In the film October, Eisenstein attempted to achieve a close fit between conceptual ideas and visual images: the pulling down of a statue of the tsar from its pedestal is made to symbolize the downfall of the oppressive regime, and the reassembling of the broken pieces of the statue the comeback of the reactionary forces. This did not work, needless to say, for the simple reason that the montage technique is reduced and rationalized to a system of semantics, formalized into a kind of grammar or hieroglyphics. When montage, which can be infinitely flexible in its combination of shots and open to endless possibilities of meaning, is reduced to a more or less formal "language," a film is bound to be schematic, formulaic, and blatantly didactic. Film language becomes merely a visual illustration of ideological messages. The films made during the Cultural Revolution are good examples of this; the screen images are simply visual equivalents of ideological messages. Like many other films made before the Cultural Revolution, Nie Er is suffused with an aura of lived life. It not only delves into everyday experience, but also alludes to the unconscious desires of its characters. In representing the characters in love, the film endows them with high ideals and romantic traits. They are passionate about living and are full of dreams and hopes. One scene shows Nie Er and his young friends, after they have spent the night posting revolutionary slogans on the walls of skyscrapers, walk arm in arm down the street drenched in the morning light, like couples in love. Zhao Dan, the actor who played the role of Nie Er, tried hard to bring to the fore the characteristics of a young, hopeful artist and to blend several qualities into one. He appears variously childish, impulsive, restless, passionate, talented, and humorous. This motif of romantic and vivacious youth is accentuated in another film of the same period, Song of Youth, which is rich in romantic scenes and youthful exuberance. Such scenes, with their libidinal implications, seem cut adrift from the political framework of the film and fit uneasily with ideological imperatives. Yet it is precisely the elaboration of these emotional

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scenes that provides visual pleasure for viewers, allowing them to enjoy a sensuous and aesthetic delight not dictated by political doctrines. Nie Er, to be sure, is based on an ideological premise about the nation and the state, and there is no question of its political and doctrinaire intentions. But this does not mean that the political themes define and animate each and every aspect of its images and scenes, narrowing the visual flux to a mono logical tableau. The film is permeated with multifaceted, sensuous, and sensual elements of lived experience of the individual. By providing illusions of "life" and depictions of love on the screen, the film allows viewers to recognize themselves. Fictionalized mirages of life on the screen form a mirror, in which viewers can find their identity. Imaginary identification, as in the well-known mirror stage of the infant, is a key to the pleasure and delight that viewers can derive from the film and is also the reason why the revolutionary film does not fail to be entertaining.24 The word "mirror" needs more elaboration. The infant's act of looking into the mirror and finding its own reflection is known as the mirror stage of the subject's psychic development. This metaphor allows us to envision something like imaginary identification on a cultural scale. At the mirror stage, the infant enjoys its reflected image in the mirror, because it appears perfect and complete, unlike his own biological body. By identifying with the "ideal" mirror image, the infant begins to have a sense of self, separate from his body wallowing in biological needs. Kaja Silverman has suggested that the mother's body could also be a "mirror." Parts of the mother's body, such as the breast, voice, and the gaze are objects that the infant identifies with, because they appear to him to represent his original being, lost at the moment of birth. 25 This suggests that the formation of the self is a ceaseless quest for objects that are in fact substitutes for the missing components of our own being. In this sense, the cultural environment is a vast mirror akin to the mother's body, because it is in this enlarged mirror that we find our idealized self and reap pleasure in acts of recognition. Everyday language in many cultures associates mother, home, family, homeland, and motherland into a gigantic web of familiar and endearing objects- something of a maternal fold, where one can find his or her self reassured, even while deriving a narcissistic pleasure. The notion of the mirror stage may explain why this chain of "homely" objects has an enduring fascination for anyone nurtured on it. Every culture has a large reservoir of objects or images that con-

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stitute a rich resource for the formation of a "mature" subject. To induce a pleasurable imaginary identification in its audience, the revolutionary film often relies on the native resource of imagery- figures, symbols, and narratives from Chinese culture that have shaped its members' psychic makeup and perception. Out of this rich depository of imagery, it produces ever more intensified cinematic images, which the audience has become accustomed to seeing and hearing (xi wen le jian). When an audience in the 1950's surveyed with Nie Er and Zheng Leidian the charming landscapes south of the Yangtze River, when they looked up at the magnificent Great Wall through the eyes of a character, the idealized images afforded them a quick sense of recognition and a pleasurable feeling of being at home. The idealized filmic landscapes of China have become a clicheyet repeatable and renewable with fresh delight- in the revolutionary film. One classic instance is the landscape montage in the film The Shanggan Peak (Shanggan ling), a story about the Volunteer Army soldiers in the Korean war. To the accompaniment of the popular song "My Motherland" ("Wo de zuguo"), which begins with the line "A great river runs wide" ("Yitiao da he bolang kuan") the film shows a series of the mountains and rivers in very long shots. Such vistas are what the soldiers see as they miss their homes. They are intended to effect a shared illusion of the "motherland" and allow the soldiers as well as the audience to think of themselves as children nurtured by China. Other versions of the "motherland" include hometowns or homelands, where the emphasis is on the organic attachment to the land and blood relations. A character is born and raised there. The Northeast, Lake Hong in Hubei province, Hainan Island, and numerous other native regions have become local editions of the national image of motherland. In inducing the audience's imaginary identification, the image of motherland is enforced by the image of woman. The revolutionary cinema has produced numerous memorable female images. These are not stern ideologues who lecture on Marxist doctrines, nor militant woman warriors who "shun pretty dresses of satin j And don the soldier's uniform with pride." Belligerent and masculine images of woman do occur, of course, but the revolutionary film also presents delicately feminine, maternal, sensitive women. Lin Hong, the protagonist in Song of Youth, is an example. Before she goes to her execution by firing squad, she carefully and calmly combs her hair, smoothes out the wrinkles on her dress, and, with utter gentleness

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and dignity, takes leave of her comrades. Lin Hong represents the party in the film, but she is not deprived of an attractive femininity. The image of a martyr depicted through the eyes of two young wouldbe revolutionaries in the same prison cell, Lin Hong is held up as an exemplary "maternal" figure. The image of woman/mother is often associated with the image of the party. Indeed the revolutionary film tends to displace political images into feminine and maternal images. In The Red Brigade of Lake Hong (Hong/m chiwei dui), the main protagonist, Han Ying, sings, "Lake Hong, my homeland, my dear mother." A woman, she is also the party secretary of the Red Brigade, the guerrilla troop of the region. She has a position that, if we think of Chinese culture as maledominated, may well be taken by Liu Chuang, a strong, brave man knmvn for his military prowess. Here the idea of the party and homeland become incarnate in the figure of a woman, converted into an image endowed with feminine beauty. Han Ying's image gives way to the image of mother. In the plot Han Ying's spirits fall to a low ebb after she is arrested and jailed, only to be revitalized by her mother, who encourages her daughter by telling stories from the local revolutionary tradition. Critics have noted that the revolutionary film differs from the classical Hollywood movie in its representation of woman. 26 In the revolutionary film, the female is not the passive object of visual pleasure for the voyeuristic male viewer. Instead, she is often the agent or hero that propels the development of narrative events. Although this claim makes a valid point, it is also true that, in its emphasis on "feminine" traits and its depiction of beautiful female characters, the revolutionary film at times does make the image of women an object of pleasurable perception. In his analysis of the maternal motif in Zhang Yimo' s Red Sorghum (Hong gaoliang), Yucjin Wang has also argued this point. He suggests that the figure of mother is embedded in both the Chinese tradition and socialist ideology and is regularly "evoked to elicit absolute unthinking allegiance, as maternity is related to the natural, the unquestionable." Wang points to an alternative maternal image in Red Sorghum as a devastating critique of the official image of mother, celebrating a sexual jouissancc and carnival of myriad meanings as revolt against the discursive norms, be they traditional or socialist.27 The female image caters to and taps into the audience's unconscious potential for pleasurable viewing and imaginary identification.

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It may be a prelude to the culturally orchestrated formation of the

subject, marking the imaginary stage on the way to full-fledged revolutionary subjectivity. Chris Berry has argued that the viewing subject projected by the post-1949 Chinese cinema is a "nonindividual, communal subject." The camera movement, as he has demonstrated, is seldom "aligned with individual characters." 28 This argument agrees with the generally accepted assumption that the revolutionary aesthetic privileges the collective at the expense of the individual. Although this view is accurate as a rough description, its underlying assumption is questionable. One can ask: What is the essential core that constitutes the uniqueness of the individual, as a pure, irreducible, separate identity untainted by social and cultural influences? If the subject emerges through entry into public language, this means that the subject is possible only through its insertion into a collective chain of meaning; otherwise, it is a "nonsubject," a bundle of nerves and needs swimming in an" oceanic" space. In this sense, the term" individual subject" turns out to be an oxymoron, similar to the notion of "personally impersonal," in the classical aesthetic judgment exemplified in Kant.2 9 But it is a revealing oxymoron, for in order to rid itself of the stain of oxymoron it has to put to rest the rigid separation of the individual and the collective. In other words, if the term is not to be self-contradictory, it must refer to a complex and dialectic relation between the individual and the cultural environment. The perennial conflict between the individual and society does not mean that the individual cannot thrive on bonds with the collective and vice versa. Many campaigns for "group identity" and their claims on authentic experiences have proved this. My concern with the revolutionary film compels me to look at a darker, more sinister aspect of this "mutual enrichment" between individual and collective, in which the individual can be made to feel more authentically his own self and experience an ecstatic self-enforcement precisely at the moment when he is at the bidding of the party-state, when he is designated a" communal subject." I need to bracket the phrase "mutual enrichment," because it is a caricature of the genuine experience of freedom and even an insult to a true sense of personal dignity. But this is not to deny that a revolutionary soldier, even as a" communal" subject, can have what appears to him or her an authentic experience. A "communal" subject is not necessarily a trampled slave with the tyrant's foot on his back. One sinister aspect of an individual's submission to oppression is that she

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may desire her own submission: she can feel free only when she is in chains. Theodor Adorno's analysis of the subjectivity of the mass mind with regard to the image of the leader suggests a way to approach the reciprocal relation between individual and collective. In Adorno's account, the autonomous bourgeois subject is in decline because of the increasing standardization of modern life, which fosters reified and administered consciousness. The crippled and diminished ego, motivated by narcissistic self-love, yearns for objects that may satisfy and repair the ego, creating a perfect condition for the cult of the Superman. The gigantic leader image comes to satisfy the subject's needs and affords him a sense of self-enlargement. "By making the leader his ideal he loves himself, as it were, but gets rid of the stains of frustration and discontent which mar his picture of his empirical sel£." 30 The psychic mechanism at work here is imaginary identification. The leader must be larger than life but also close to one's own image. So a personalized leader is a" great little man," a figure" who suggests both omnipotence and the idea that he is just one of the folks." The leader image re-enacts the mirror stage: he embodies the individual's wish "to submit to authority and to be the authority himsel£." 31 The image of leader is male, but according to Adorno, the male figure is able to attribute to his followers female, passive features, converting political bonds into a libidinal one. This insight applies to the numerous female figures embodying the party and nation in the revolutionary film. With these female figures we move from an identification with the father to one with the mother. If the father is a figure of law and legitimacy, why should we be encouraged to identify with the mother? Perhaps in this identification we may find the key to the psychic mechanism of the revolutionary film. A tentative speculation is all I can offer at this moment. The revolutionary film also has the capacity to induce the audience to regress to the infantile, mirror stage, and to arouse their desire for imaginary union with the mother. The signifying system of the revolutionary film can also be described, following Christian Metz, as "the imaginary signifier," which works on the unconscious memory of the audience and encourages them to daydream. 32 The contents of this daydream not only stem from the viewing subject's infantile experience in his or her nursling dependence in the cradle, but also draw on cultural and collective memory. Whether appealing to the infantile desire for imaginary union or the cultural unconscious, the revolutionary film

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effects imaginary identification with a libidinally gratifying object, affording a certain measure of visual delight and psychological pleasure. Without a recognition of this pleasure principle of the revolutionary film, it is hard to comprehend the popular appeal of the revolutionary cinema, a medium that surpasses all other art forms in its aesthetic power and reach. From feminine beauty to love between young men and women, from the beautiful landscape to the missed home region, from the folk melodies to the revolutionary songs that have been firmly deposited into the unconscious of many generations of viewers, the revolutionary film is a mirror in which the audience finds visual delight and libidinal satisfaction. What distinguishes the revolutionary film from the classical Hollywood movie may be this: while attempting to induce imaginary identification, the revolutionary film also seeks to displace and reorient the audience's psychic energy toward the frameworks sanctioned by the dominant ideology. The imaginary realm is that of the infant's relation to the mother's body. The ~evolutionary imaginary corresponds initially to the idea of the beautiful, in which the subject's desire accords with a responsive or nurturing presence. But to be a true revolutionary subject "made of special stuff," to be able to wage the permanent revolution, one is not supposed to tarry long in the sensual pleasure of the mother's bosom. We must be wrenched from the imaginary effeminacy and tender comfort and strive for the sublime (the aesthetic condition designated by the Chinese phrase chonggao). The sublime here is the ideological imperative of the symbolic order. Zheng Leidian's passion for Nie Er must vent itself in the direction of nationalist enthusiasm. Nie Er, inspired by his sexual love for Zheng, must write revolutionary music. Beautiful females promise delight; rich and pretty towns invite the gaze; magnificent landscapes inspire admiration. But behind these images is the ideological decree of the symbolic order. Female beauty is more than an object for the eye; it is also an embodiment of the party. The magnificent mountains and rivers are linked with maternal figures of the nation and state; the beloved is also the mentor and muse of revolution. The revolutionary film thus achieves its didactic purposes by means of evoking imaginary identification and arousing pleasure. Its mechanism of ideological dissemination is captured by two Chinese phrases denoting a noncoercive manner of indoctrination: xun xun shan yu (gradual, slow seduction) and he feng xi yu (soft breezes and fine rain). It elevates the audience to the sublime height of the subject

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position through a detour of imaginary pleasures. On the one hand, the revolutionary film recognizes the importance of the individual's libidinal pleasure and targets its audience accordingly. On the other hand, it also attempts to orient the released psychic energy to the governing imperatives of the party-state. Sight, sound, image, and color on the screen do not just appeal to the audience's ability to think, but penetrate to their unconscious. The revolutionary film uses dreamlike images to play on and transform the collective unconscious, smuggling into the innermost recesses of the collective mind the ideologically charged but aesthetically satisfying images. By means of imaginary identification, the revolutionary film synthesizes mother and father. Or rather, it compels one to look up to the father through the mother, thus inscribing the political law on the living sensibility of its audience. The revolutionary film does not convey ideology in a "naked," flagrant fashion. It uses indirect, aesthetic means to make the audience linger for a while in the imaginary realm, only to elevate them to the sublime order of the symbolic. The function of the state ideological apparatus is to reproduce subjects adequate to the maintenance and operations of the party-state. In carrying out its ideological function, the revolutionary film is not simply a handmaiden of the ideological apparatus. It is an apparatus on its own, with its proper aesthetic tasks to perform. It is easy to quote l\1ao's remark that revolutionary art is nothing but "cogs and wheels" in the revolutionary machine and to dismiss the aesthetic dimension of the revolutionary film. But the other side of Mao's remark should also be heeded. Mao said that artistic works "in their turn exert a great influence on politics." 33 If the revolutionary film has a certain influence, it is its particular, dual aesthetic ideology- that of the imaginary and sublimation. The politics of the revolutionary film is radically different from that of the mass rallies or political brainwashing sessions. It reproduces ideology in the collective unconscious, at the level of sensibility, affect, desire, and pleasure. It is a politics aestheticized. Aestheticized politics, by bringing the lived and sensuous life of the individual under the hegemonic sway of political rule, is the ultimate ideal of an authoritarian state.

5 The Sublime Subject of Practice The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history. -MaoZedong

The great historian Sima Qian once wrote that while reading the Confucian classics, he was seized by a strong urge to know how the person who uttered those sacred words had lived his life and conducted himself. So he made a trip of pilgrimage to the state of Lu and paid homage at Confucius' onetime residence, now the Confucian Temple. The historian found himself musing over Confucius' furniture, clothing, and daily utensils. He also watched the rituals and ceremonies performed by Confucian scholars, which made tangible the life of Confucius as he lived it. As Sima Qian lingered over the revered residence and objects, he reflected that many kings had attained the reputation of sages, but all of them flourished and vanished in a hurry. Confucius, though of humble origins, had bequeathed a wealth of learning studied by scholars and admired by kings and aristocrats and, through dozens of generations, had been honored as the ultimate sage. The man had become immortal. Sima Qian' s feeling of wonder, of a humbled pride mixed with a pleasure of elevation, is expressed in the poetic fragment that crowns this passage (see Chapter 3). This poetic fragment dramatizes the historian's mind, elevated as it was by the compelling aura of Confucius' residence and the ritual re-enactments. It also reveals a peculiar movement of the mind when confronted by a grand object. Faced with the magnificence of Confucius, who seems to rise above the spectator and transcend time and the social hierarchy in his immortal virtue, the spectator feels the pettiness and limitations of his ordinary humanity. The height of Confu-

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cius' morality and learning is so great that the beholder can never hope to reach it. This realization does not, however, prevent the viewer from being released into another turn of mind: although he cannot reach the heights of Confucius, he can nevertheless aspire to them. This mental summons to strive toward the inaccessible heights of virtue invigorates the viewer and renews his self-confidence. This scenario brings to mind Kant's account of the psychology of the subject faced with the sublime object. In the encounter with a space beyond measurement or an overwhelming force, the subject experiences a sense of cognitive helplessness, an inability to comprehend the endless magnitude. Or he may feel a keen sense of physical impotence, a powerlessness to resist the crushing forces. This feeling marks a moment of distress and blockage, a "momentary checking of our vital powers." 1 But in the midst of this distress, uncertainty, or humiliation, the subject is quickly saved and redeemed by a sudden, triumphant renewal of confidence in the dignity of reason and the ethical strength of his indestructible humanity. The affinity between Kant's sublime subject and Sima Qian's admiration for Confucius is a recurrent feature of comparative studies by contemporary Chinese theorists attempting to infuse Chinese elements into the Western sublime. Indeed, the poetic fragment by Sima Qian is a favorite of contemporary aestheticians and critics trying to convey some of the psychological attributes of the Kantian sublime in terms of classical Chinese idioms. The great deeds and earthshaking achievements of heroes, says the aesthetician Li Zehou, inspire us with sublime feelings, to look up to them as to high mountain peaks, and challenge us to greater endeavors. In his description of the sublime, Li offers an expression attributed to Mencius: "Who is Shun? Who am I? But an enterprising man should aspire to the example of Shun!" 2 This repeats the little drama of the mind caught in an experience of humiliation alternating with empowerment- the scenario of initial distress about one's personal limitations followed by uplifting aspirations. The sublime in Kant is closely linked to his ethical concerns, as are those classical Chinese adjurations to rise above our ordinary humanity and ascend to the heights of moral perfection. This ethical preoccupation has been a factor in Chinese aestheticians' discovery of a theoretical advantage in the Western theory of the sublime. But Sima Qian's story is open to a series of implications beyond ethical concerns. In going beyond the Confucian texts to get a palpable sense of

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how the Sage lived his daily life in his own residence, the historian seemed to suggest that abstract words and doctrines should be fleshed out by lived experience, graspable by the senses as well as the intellect. This familiar motif can be described as aesthetic (as opposed to the purely intellectual or theoretical). In elevating Confucius above the kings and in praising Confucianism as a timeless doctrine enshrined by emperors and aristocrats, the historian seemed to be directing his attention to the political value of Confucianism. Here, in a nutshell, ethical, political, and aesthetic concerns are rapidly brought into a close relation. If Sima Qian' s eulogy on the inaccessible loftiness of the Sage has fascinated Chinese theorists as they assimilate the Western category of the sublime, it may in part be due to the fecundity and versatility made possible by the sublime in dealing with the set of relations embodied in this scenario. In this chapter, I address these questions: How have Chinese aestheticians, especially by the representative aesthetician Li Zehou, read and reinterpreted Kant's and Schiller's theories of the sublime? How has the sublime been assimilated into traditional critical discourse? What has been the place of the sublime in the aesthetic project of modeling the individual's sense and sensibility into culturally regulated functions? And finally, how has the sublime been made to resonate with a Chinese version of Marxist discourse and pressed into the service of the myth of the people as the maker of history and into the cult of the Leader?

The Aesthetics Debate As a philosopher, aesthetician, and historian, Li Zehou is known not only in academic circles but also among college students and young people. His books occupy prominent places in bookstores in China and Chinese bookstores in the West. He is widely read and quoted. In the late 1950's, Li Zehou joined the" aesthetics debate" with his polemical essays on the then well-known and Western-educated aesthetician Zhu Guangqian and others. He has since emerged as one of the foremost theorists in aesthetic and cultural studies in China. The debate on aesthetics, which lasted from 1956 to 1962, was sponsored and encouraged by the Communist party officials who supervised ideology and culture. The debate started as a campaign to criticize Western aesthetic ideas suspected of being "idealist." As usual in such campaigns, theoretical battles were harbingers of personal persecution. 3 But the writers persecuted seemed casualties more

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of the Anti-Rightist (Jan you) movement in the late 1950's than of the debate itself. In any case, many prominent aestheticians did emerge unscathed. This was especially true of Zhu Guangqian, who bore the brunt of the criticism. In his reminiscences, Zhu Guangqian recalled that Hu Qiaomu, the then-president of the Central Party School, assured him in advance that the debate was intended only to clarify issues and promote understanding, not to persecute. 4 Whatever its truthfulness, Hu' s comment does not prevent us from distinguishing political persecution from theoretical debates. The distinction may enable us to see the debate not as a crude form of politics but as revealing a subtle link between the political and the aesthetic. On evidence of published papers, it appears that the debate began as a scholarly exchange of views, without the open polemics that were a prelude to political persecution. Many important aesthetic issues such as the artistic imagination, aesthetic perception, the objective or subjective nature of beauty, the notion of the typical, realism, Marxist aesthetics, and so on were discussed, theorized, and developed. Essays, research papers, and replies by the participants were published in such partycontrolled journals and newspapers as New Construction (Xin jianshc), People's Daily (Rcnnzin ribao), Plzilosop!zical Studies (Zizcxue yanjiu), and Guangming Daily (Guangming ribao). 5 In the late 1950's, the issue of aesthetics might have seemed a scholarly concern smacking of bourgeois ideologies dangerous to a fledgling state eager to establish ideological hegemony, but much seemed to be at stake in this debate. Its scale and the political investment in it are apparent in the attention paid the discussions by the leaders of the Central Committee of the party. Hu Qiaomu was asked to give them a briefing on the debate in a meeting at the Central Party School. Hu later invited Zhu Guangqian to give a series of lectures on aesthetics to the students of the Central Party School, who were selected from among party cadres across the country and being trained to become high-ranking party leaders. 6 The" aesthetics debate" was a remarkable cultural event and, for our present purposes, symptomatic of the subtle interplay between the aesthetic and the political. The phenomenon is a neglected area of contemporary Chinese culture and deserves more scholarly attention. One result of the debate was that Zhu Guangqian, the "idealist" aesthetician, started to advocate a more materialist aesthetics. Zhu Guangqian was invited to lecture at the Central Party School in the

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summer of 1962, after he had undergone self-criticism and was developing his aesthetic theories in line with historical materialism and the Marxist notion of practice. Li Zehou was catalytic in effecting Zhu' s change of mind. Before the debate, Zhu Guangqian acknowledged in a letter to a friend that Li' s criticism of his theory was well informed and carried weight.! Li Zehou was the first Chinese theorist to take Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts seriously and to draw on its humanist notion of practice in working out his aesthetic ideas. Li's research drew Zhu' s attention to the Manuscripts, and Zhu even undertook to retranslate some chapters of the book. 8 In a brief autobiography, Zhu wrote that his major scholarly work was done after his "conversion" to historical and dialectical materialism through the debate. A Histon; of'vVestern Aesthetics (Xifmzg meixue slzi), written by Zhu as a university textbook and enormously influential in shaping aesthetic discourse in China, initiated a scholarly attempt to sort through a number of key aesthetic concepts in the Western tradition by applying Marx's notions. 9 Whether Zhu had really changed his idealist aesthetics remains an open question. In the preface to the Chinese edition of his Psychology of Tragedy (Beiju xinli xue), written as his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Strasbourg, Germany, Zhu confessed that he remained, in spite of his public image, a "disciple of Nietzsche." 10 But it is safe to assume that under political and ideological pressures Zhu was compelled to make concessions and even contributions to the Chinese edition of Marxist aesthetics represented by Li Zehou. Li Zehou not only was instrumental in initiating a Marxist aesthetics but also succeeded in bringing Kant into Chinese aesthetic discourse. He has been a Kantian scholar since the debate, and his book The Critique of Critical Philosophy (Pipan zlzexue de pipan), as he himself acknowledges, is his most important work. 11 Li Zehou's theory of the sublime grew out of his study of Marx and Kant. It is a blending of Marxist terms with Kantian vocabulary and is elaborated in his essay "Concerning the Sublime and the Comic" ("Guanyu chonggao yu huaji") written during the debate. The essay was not published until 1980 and has since become very influential. In the next section, I analyze this essay in relation to Kant, in the hope of outlining a Chinese theory of the sublime. In Li's essay, we can trace some recurrent themes and terms in Chinese aesthetic discourse and literary criticism regarding the sublime.

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Graven Imnges ofNnture nnd History It may be useful to start by analyzing differences in the ways Kant and Li Zchou read sublime images. At one point in his discussion of the sublime, Kant apparently felt a qualm about the abstractness of his presentation and attempted to justify it. He wrote that "we need not fear that the feeling of the sublime will lose by so abstract a mode of presentation." On the contrary, the very abstractness is an advantage, indeed the essence of the sublime. The sublime does not depend on sensory images and figures, whose presentation is no longer possible because of the failure of the faculty of imagination. The sublime thrives precisely on the breakdown of the imagination, by transcending the limits of sensory images and ascending into the suprasensory realm. Thus abstractness is but" a presentation of the Infinite." Kant appealed to the authority of the Bible to prove his point: "There is no sublimer passage in the Jewish law than the command, 'Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything which is in heaven or in the earth or under the earth.' " 12 Yet Kant constantly resorted to sensory images in talking about the sublime, even though these images are said to be the negative presentation of the supersensible. Thus, we have a whole set of images that have become canonical and conventional: the overhanging rocks, the huge clouds in the sky, lightning flashes and thunderous storms, the boundless sea in tumult, the night sky and the infinitude of stars, and so on. Li Zehou also dwells on these familiar images, to which he adds his own. Li describes the aesthetic feeling aroused by the sublime object by evoking the familiar Kantian images, but against these a\vesome natural phenomena he places the heroic and cultural achievements of human beings. These achievements include heroic actions as well as artistic monuments of genius and creative endeavors, such as a great tragedy or a grand symphony. These achievements give us sublime satisfaction. Li places a higher value on artistic and human achievements than on natural objects as the source for generating the feeling of the sublime. This is partly the reason he gives so much attention to tragic heroes and singles out the dramatic form of tragedy as the most compelling genre for manifesting the sublime. Indeed, he devotes a whole chapter to the relation of the sublime to tragedy (more on this below). The stress on the sublime in human cultural achievements leads Li to divide the sublime into two categories: the sublime in human-

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kind's practical activity and the sublime in nature. In human beings' socio-historical activities, Li avers, we find sublime images of great men and heroes who readily sacrifice themselves for the well-being of their fellow humans and who embody the most admirable personality traits and highest moral principles. Thus, the sublime derives from humans' practical activity, and almost all of Li' s examples are cultural constructions by enterprising human beings. 13 How does the sublime human activity relate to the sublime in nature? Terrifying objects in nature- stormy seas, bottomless abysses, rugged mountains-are indeed a source of the sublime. Yet according to Li, these objects do not give rise to the sublime merely by virtue of their size, power, shape- their physical properties. The view of a nature that is sublime by virtue of its sheer physical power or size is the error of "mechanical materialists" like the Russian critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-89). In human history, countless natural objects were once a source of terror by dint of being alien forces hostile to humans: they stood in an antagonistic relation to human purposes and practice. Human beings were once helpless before the merciless elements. Objects of real danger and threat aroused only fear and terror rather than feelings of the sublime. But these natural phenomena can become objects for aesthetic contemplation in the backward glance from the height of civilization's accomplishments. The sublime arises when natural hazards are seen as traces of the once-arduous human struggle against nature; when they become a form emptied of the threatening content-a form that bears witness to the conquest of nature by human practice. Without human conquest, natural objects cannot be a source of aesthetic appreciation. Li writes, "Wild beasts are to primitive people as the storm is to the farmer and the traveler; it cannot be an object of sublime appreciation. Desolate and melancholy scenes can take on a sublime quality only in the advanced age of civilization and society" (Meixue lunji, p. 208). Li seems to suggest, apparently in a Kantian fashion, that horrifying objects of nature generate the feeling of the sublime, because human achievements and conquest shine forth, indirectly and retrospectively, from among these once life-threatening and life-crushing objects and forces. Although Kant regarded human achievements as capable of generating the feeling of the sublime- achievements like the Pyramids in Egypt and St. Peter's at Rome-he did not allow human products to be the source of the sublime: "We must not exhibit the sublime in products of art (e.g. buildings, pillars, etc.) where human purpose

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determines the form as well as the size" (Critique, p. 91). Kant made this statement as he was searching for a "suitable example" for the sublime that is purely aesthetic. By "purely aesthetic" is meant that the object is "mingled with no teleological judgment or judgment of reason" (Critique, p. 91). Human artifacts, whether artistic or utilitarian, are not good examples of the sublime because they are bound up with human purposes and shaped by human designs. Derrida also draws our attention to this in his reading of this passage in Kant. Human artifacts, Derrida writes, "are on the scale of man, who determines their form and dimensions. The mastery of the human artist here operates with a view to an end, determining, defining, giving form."t4 For Kant, the sublime is that which transcends the human and overspills the finite boundaries of the imagination. If artifacts are too finite and too human to be sublime, nature is also disqualified from the sublime if it is touched with human intents. We must not find the sublime, said Kant, in such" objects of nature as presuppose the concept of a purpose" (Critique, p. 110). But we can find the sublime in raw and untamed nature, and this only when scenes of nature evince boundless magnitude or exert a tremendous power that does violence to the sensible faculty of the subject. For Kant the sublime is predicated on a certain form of consciousness in reaction to nature. In the earlier treatise Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, he began by stating the same principle. The feelings of the sublime or of the beautiful "rest not so much upon the nature of the external things that arouse them as upon each person's disposition to be moved by these to pleasure or pain."15 In the "Analytic of the Sublime," the natural object is said to serve merely as an "occasion" (Critique, p. 82). The sublime can be found in an object of nature, because "by occasion of it boundlessness is represented" (Critiq11c, p. 82), and this gives rise to the mathematical sublime in which boundless magnitude cannot be taken in by our limited senses and apprehended by our imagination, yet can nevertheless be thought in its totality by a totalizing reason. For Kant life-crushing nature is only a theater for the drama of the mind, in which the rational subject emerges triumphant in the end. The two actors in this drama represent the two different faculties of the mind. The imagination, which is attached to sensible objects in nature, provides sensory presentations of them. The faculty of reason, equipped with ideas, concepts, and moral principles, comprehends and subsumes the manifold under the idea of totality. Threatened by

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nature's vast and dangerous forces, the imagination shows its limits and inadequacy, however hard it may strain itself to visualize the boundless object. The faculty of reason arrives promptly on the scene at this moment of crisis, not to rescue the imagination but to assert itself more forcefully at the expense of an imagination now on the verge of breakdown. "Therefore the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own destination, which, by a certain subreption, we attribute to an object of nature (conversion of respect for the idea of humanity in our subject into respect for the object). This makes intuitively evident the superiority of the rational determination of our cognitive faculties to the greatest faculty of our sensibility" (Critique, p. 96). Both Kant and Li give the human a place in the sublime. Kant used natural objects to reveal the sublime superiority of reason to sensibility and the rational and ethical destiny of the self. Li enables natural objects to reveal the heroic endeavor of humans to conquer external and disorderly nature. We may note a similarity between Kant and Li in their emphasis on the human, but there is a world of difference between the two. For Kant natural objects are to be enjoyed aesthetically rather than used practically by the human subject. When we call the sight of the ocean sublime, Kant said, we should brush aside the practical knowledge of it as a "vast kingdom of aquatic creatures, or as the great source of those vapors that fill the air with clouds for the benefit of the land" (Critique, p. 110). We should instead look at the ocean as poets do, and attend merely to "what strikes the eye." When the ocean becomes tumultuous, we should regard it "as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything" (Critique, p. 111). If in Kant nature is a scene for the subject to contemplate and to play out its drama of transcendence, for Li it is a scene for active and transformative human action and enterprise. One scene Li depicts as sublime is quite characteristic of socialist China: a gigantic construction site, lit up as if in broad daylight by electric lights, where tens of thousands of workers are hard at work. Scenes like these, he claims, often fill us with a sense of sublimity16 Other images of human enterprise, provided by a commentator in line with Li' s imagery, include the Sahara Desert with the ringing of the camel bells; uninhabited and desolate plains whose silence is broken by the sounds of oil drilling, the Himalayas with courageous mountain climbers; the Pacific Ocean with a solitary boat traversing its vast expanseY All these images point to a primordial nature,

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desolate, life-threatening in its rawness and unpredictable danger. Yet amid these scenes are some scraps of the human, some signs of brave and strenuous human activity in defiance of the elements. In the thick of gigantic, life-crushing nature, humans struggle to stake out a livable space and finally conquer the threatening external forces. Li makes these images resonate with the Marxist idea of practice. The sublime is indeed to be located in humans, but humans are not to be defined as an inner world of subjective, individual consciousness, or as a contemplative, aesthetic subject, but as an agent or a group of agents in ceaseless, vigorous action. Actions here are not individual exertions and endeavors but humankind's socio-historical practice to transform the world. The Marxist concept of practice has a Chinese version in Mao Zedong's philosophical work "On Practice" ("Shijian lun"), and Li' s presentation is couched in Maoist language. Practice consists in "productive struggle, class struggle, and scientific experiments"- three familiar phrases coined by Mao. Humans are not only engaged in but also shaped by these activities (Meixue lunji, p. 204). In this materialist scheme, the beautiful and the sublime are aesthetic manifestations of human practice. For Li, the beautiful does not stand in opposition to the sublime; these two concepts are rather the recto and verso of human practice. The definition of the beautiful, like that of the sublime, is to be located in human beings' active practice in transforming nature and society. It is thus in the dynamic relationship between human practice and the reality in need of change, rather than in the aesthetic subject, that we should seek for the beautiful. The beautiful arises when reality answers and confirms human purposes and intentions in transformative practice. Li's account of the beautiful is a smooth blending of Marxist vocabulary and Kantian terms, with the former constantly emptying out the latter. Human practice is marked by a "purposiveness," but to be fulfilled, human purposes have to correspond to the "lawfulness" of reality. Hence human practice, if it is not blind action, is "purposiveness corresponding to lawfulness" (Meixue lunji, p. 206). On the other hand, when reality proves answerable and congenial to human purposiveness, it is "lawfulness corresponding to purposiveness" (Meixue lwzji, p. 206). The beautiful (mei), then, is the unity between purposiveness and lawfulness. Purposiveness, as desired by the subject's will, can also translate into the ethical term "the Good" (shan), and lawfulness into the cognitive term "Truth" (zhm). So the beautiful

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arises at the moment when practice and reality, human purpose and nature, Goodness and Truth fit harmoniously one to another. The beautiful harmony of Goodness and Truth, purposiveness and lawfulness, however, is only a static moment of equilibrium. It is in the incessant breakdowns of this equilibrium that we are asked to find the sublime. Social practice is dynamic and arduous and constantly finds itself in sharp conflict with an intransigent reality. In humankind's difficult struggle with nature and unjust social conditions, human purposes constantly clash with hostile forces and with human limitations. Yet in the overcoming of the conflicts and difficulties by human agents we can find the sublime. To behold heroic acts of overcoming hostile forces is to experience a sublime feeling. Li delineates the psychological drama of the sublime in a way that brings to mind the scenario of distress and transcendence noted earlier. Quoting Chernyshevsky, Li states that greatness fills us with awe, fear, and surprise. Even as we are being jolted out of our complacency into a painful realization of our limitations, pettiness, and frailties as individuals, we are inspired by awesome figures and images that make us proud of our native strength and dignity as humans (Meixue lunji, p. 203). The sublime produces a moral effect, which is a stirring and inspiriting emotion accompanied by satisfaction and pleasure. This emotion works like a catharsis: it "arouses our own courage and will, and we are compelled and encouraged to conquer and triumph over the object; it also elevates our ascending will" (Meixue lunji, p. 203). We are compelled to overcome and purify ourselves of pettiness, triviality, and mediocrity. At this juncture, Li quotes the remark by Mencius mentioned above: "Who is Shun? Who am I? But an enterprising man should aspire to the example of Shun!" In working the sublime toward ethical elevation, Li Zehou' s text reads very much like some ethically charged passages in Kant's analytic of the sublime. Kant wrote that the life-crushing natural force makes us "recognize our own physical impotence," but in the same breath he said that it "calls up that power in us ... of regarding as small the things about which we are solicitous (goods, health, and life)," and "thus humanity in our person remains unhumiliated, although the individual might have to submit to this dominion" (Critique, p. 101). The ethical destination sketched by Li is a far cry from the Kantian notion of humanity's ethical destiny. In Kant, ethical principles,

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though universally valid, must be realized through individual responsibility and choice. True to an orthodox strand of Marxism, Li does not regard the individual as a source of meaning and value, much less a command post for making ethical choices. This version of Marxism considers the individual as meaningful and valuable only with reference to the ensemble of social relations and formations. The individual is not regarded as a full-blooded being in his or her irreducible singularity and idiosyncrasy, but is frequently perceived in the abstract, as an incarnation of the attributes of social and economic relations. Individuals and the social formations they inhabit are construed, as it were, in a metaphorical relationship: the individual appears, in Paul Smith's words, as "a synecdochal figure," determined "by the definition of the whole in and through which they accede to 'real' existence." 1R This notion of the individual functions not only in Li's discussion of the ethical dimension of the sublime but also, as I show in the following section, in a number of other aesthetic categories in his discussion. Since the individual is only a synecdochal figure embodying social determinations, the subject's ethical destiny is submission to the material process of social formations and the knowledge of human practice, which is carried out in accordance with the "laws" of social and historical evolution. It is both an understanding of the laws of history and society and a moral command. It dictates individual choice and orients human practice in line with the irresistible march of history. Li quotes his favorite remark by Marx: "Man is a sum total of social relations" (Meixue lzmji, p. 205). As sum total, the individual is not an island of everyday activity but incarnates the collective will and goals of a certain social group engaged in a world-transforming practice. In class societies, representative individuals sum up the essential features of the progressive class and act as its vanguard: the revolutionary party. The individual's destiny is thus an ethical command issued from the decree of history- history spearheaded by progressive social forces and the revolutionary party. The sublime in an individual figure is ethically inspiring because all the progressive truth and essence of history shine forth through her or him, as through a synecdochal figure. Li' s pronouncement is self-explanatory. Human beings can produce according to the laws of beauty. Is not this precisely a process in which they engage in practice and struggle to transform the world? Herein lies the essential character of humanity's immortality in the ethical realm, and its sublimity in the aes-

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thetic realm. Only by means of collective and social strength can beauty be created in life. As far as an individual is concerned, his sublimity in the final analysis consists in the fact that he embodies a form of social existence-an existence as a member of an advanced class or a social group fighting and laying down their lives for progressive social causes, rather than as an animalistic existence marked by the instincts of preserving a natural life. In life and practical struggle for progressive causes, the more selfless the individual is, the more committed to the collective and ready to sacrifice her private self, the more clearly her ethical reason- the sum total of all social relations (in class society the ethical reason is the class character and the party principle)- shines forth in clarity and self-consciousness. And the more she is qualified to be the object of the sublime. Huang Jiguang and Xiang Xiuli are sublime, for they went through fire and water for the motherland and the people. Lei Feng, Ouyang Hai, and many other countless heroes living today are sublime, for they are sacrificing themselves for others, and for the great ideals of socialism and Communism. (Meixue lunji, p. 205) Here the sublime becomes an ethic of self-sacrifice, a categorical imperative of collective goals. In contrast to Kant's sublime, the sublime in Li Zehou is another form of beauty, in which human purposes come into conflict with the real. Out of such conflicts comes the heartening prospect that human purposes will be confirmed by another "lawful" reality. The notion of "lawfulness" can be interpreted as the "essential nature" of social evolution and progressive causes carried out by the agency of sublime revolutionary heroes. But what about the reality that is overcome and conquered? If human purposes ultimately must correspond to the lawful advance of history, why should there be so much sacrifice of lives and even bloodshed and death? Why should we go through fire and water if our purposes in practice are supposed to be answered or answerable by the lawfulness of what we are working on? Isn't human practice the incarnation of the workings and movement of the real? It is in response to these questions that Li attempts to distinguish the sublime from the beautiful. The sublime, Li says, shows the conflict-ridden process of practice and its struggle with the real. It is a dynamic process in which the real presents challenges to and wreaks destruction on human purposes in practice, resulting in contradictions, failures, and struggles. The focus on conflict leads Li Zehou to fix his attention on tragedy. He considers tragedy to be the fullest expression of the sublime and devotes much

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more space to the tragic sublime than to the other aspects of it. For him, the basic feature of tragedy is its dramatic conflict, and it thus possesses a dynamic structure that mimes the conflict between practice and the real. "It is precisely in the development of plot or of character that tragedy employs dramatic forms ridden with intense conflicts to reflect summarily the real conflict between the real and practice" (Mcixuc lunji, p. 210). This takes us back to the question of what human practice is in conflict with or up against. Li surveys various conflicts in Greek and modern tragedies and comes up with a notion of the real that seems to lie beyond the pale of the predictable and presumed "lawfulness." Obstruction and destruction result from what Western critics since Aristotle have called "Fate." Fate is blind and ineluctable; it strikes unexpectedly and arbitrarily, meting out punishments and raining down calamities indiscriminately. Fate constantly catches humans off guard and obstructs human purposes and expectations. Li's characterization of Fate docs not differ from conventional notions about the mythical dimension of Fate in Greek tragedy, in which Fate can be described in two key words used by Walter Benjamin: "demonic" and "ambiguous." Fate is demonic because it seems full of evil and destructive intentions incomprehensible to human intelligence. It is ambiguous because it affords no clear structure of meaning and no identifiable hierarchy of authority.1 9 True to historical materialism, Li does not endorse such a notion of Fate, which borders dangerously on a vision of history as a morass of chance and chaos. If we remove the mystifying veils from Fate, he points out, we \viii realize that it signifies the cognitive impotence and backwardness of earlier, primitive peoples who had not yet grasped the objective law-the law of nature and of society. In the modern tragedy centered on human character, Fate seems to become the fate of individual desire and will. Fate is represented as the fatal flaw of a character, as exemplified by Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth. But the conflict of individual wills is again to be understood as a drama representing the conflict between progressive and reactionary social forces. We can see two notions of the real at work in Li's analysis of tragedy. There is an order of the real whose movement is regulated by the law of nature and history. There is another reality under the shadow of ineluctable Fate- or under the unjust, reactionary social forces. These are the forces hostile to human practice. They may exist and impose themselves at the present moment as the actual reality and

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have their historical raison d'etre, in the manner of the well-known Hegelian proposition "The rational is the real, and the real is rational." They will, however, be overcome by human practice- the worldtransforming project that corresponds to the inevitable advance of history- thus bringing a new order of the real into being. The tragic sublime is closely tied to the ethics of the sublime. In the face of Fate and reactionary forces, the human subject as a single individual may be petty, powerless, and insignificant. His struggle and defiance may be futile. He may suffer defeat, loss, pains, calamity, and death. But the calamity and death we behold with pity and fear in the tragic hero are not those of a single, private human being. His heroic deeds are significant for the fashioning of our subjectivity. Although the struggle fails, the tragic hero thrives on his defeat and arouses more effectively sublime feelings in the thousands in the audience" (Meixue lunji, p. 212). The audience is inspired with feelings of respect, seriousness, and self-pride. A tragic death heralds the advent of a new order of reality and holds out the promise that we, engaged in a collective enterprise, can be conquerors of evil fate and masters of history. The sublime-tragic hero becomes a figure of transcendence, enabling the inspired audience to transcend the individual calamity to become members of a community engaged in transformative practice, and to recognize their common identity as the subjects of history. And since the lawfulness of reality is the telos of human purposes and therefore the ultimate Good, it is also the categorical imperative" that determines the collective ethical subject. 11

II

"Fenggu": An Interpretation Li Zehou also draws on classical texts to reinforce his discussion of the sublime. In A His ton; of Chinese Aesthetics, a multivolume work coauthored with Liu Gangji, he examines classical Chinese texts that concern aesthetic motifs similar to the sublime. As we have seen, ethical concerns- the interest in the potential power of sublime art and texts to exert a moral influence on the subject-dominate Li's theory of the sublime. This is also clearly articulated in his interpretation of the critical notion of fenggu, a concept latent in the classics of literary and art criticism and given full-fledged articulation by Liu Xie, a literary theorist and critic of the fourth century A.D. According to Li, Liu Xie coined the term fenggu. to denote a concept in his book The Literan; Mind or the Caming of Dragons (Wenxin diao long). Fenggu is one of those critical concepts so loaded with intertextual references, etymol-

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ogy, and cultural connotations that it simply defies translation. Below I analyze how Li Zehou and his collaborator have interpreted the concept and translated it into a modern aesthetic idiom. Fenggu is a composite phrase of the two Chinese characters feng and gu. In the Confucian discourse on poetry, feng, literally meaning "wind," denotes the didactic function of poetry. Tracing feng to the "Great Preface" (Da xu) and the Book of Songs (Shi jing), Li takes it to mean the teaching and inculcating of moral principles. Poetry moves by means of fcng and transforms by virtue of moral principles. 20 This concept is often said to dominate the Confucian tradition of literary criticism. One of Liu Xie's qualities, in Li's view, was his ability torestate the didactic function of feng with an emphasis on the feeling and emotion of the reader. Liu considers feng not only an expression of moral principles but also an emotional power capable of working on the audience's feelings. Gu is a more complex concept. Gu literally denotes the bone structure of the human body. But from the Han dynasty up to Liu Xie' s time, a popular school of physiognomy held that a person's bone structure determined the length of his life, his fortune, and his wealth. This school also viewed the skeletal frame as a physical sign of a person's moral nature and bearing. As Wang Chong, a Han theorist of phrenology, said: "The high and low, the rich and poor, are determined by fate; integrity and corruption are matters of nature. Not only does one's fate depend on a certain bone structure, but one's moral nature also has its phrenological manifestation." 21 One may smile at such theories as farfetched or absurd, but the significance of gu, the bone structure, as the outward sign of inner moral nature took on increasingly symbolic value over time, and by the late Han dynasty it became an important term for praising the moral integrity and incorruptibility of an upright person. Typically this upright person was pictured as a scholar-official who stood firm on Confucian principles and served a monarch with loyalty, courage, and integrity. Thus the stock compliment became widely used: "As scholar-official, he is a pillar; as a subject, he is buttressed by strong bones." 22 This symbolic usage of gu is still present in modern Chinese, as in the term guqi, used to describe a morally upright person of integrity. Gu is also a key term in classical literary theory. According to Li Zehou, critics before Liu Xie had already introduced this notion, but Liu succeeded in making gu refer to the compositional structure of literary texts. If a text is not organized around a central structure, words

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and phrases would be turned loose and degenerate into superfluous embellishments and chaos. A certain compositional structure entails a compelling power of thought and argumentation. In order to exert this power on the reader, the writer has to draw his strength from Confucian doctrines and moral teachings. Liu Xie wrote that the bone structure of a text comes from "things and their significance" that constitute the bones. Li interprets "things" as historical facts. Yet historical facts are not simply past events; rather, they are the facts that can be interpreted from the perspective of Confucianism- facts that are invested with Confucian ethico-political principles and ideas. The bone structure of a text, therefore, is built and nourished on the fund of Confucian learning and doctrine. Here gu has several shades of meaning. Confucian learning and ethical doctrine nourish and strengthen the bone structure of the scholar-writer, who is able to display outwardly an upright character and an awesome bearing. This character structure is realized as the rhetorical structure of a text, which will then exert a compelling power of thought and emotion on the reader. The notion of gu, Li Zehou claims in a summary statement, means unflinching adherence to moral principles and a sincere attitude toward "things and their significance." In short, gu signifies the sublimity of a person's moral character. These considerations of gu allow feng to take on more meanings than the mere affective appeal of the text. Liu Xie often used fenggu as one phrase, but he sometimes spoke of feng as a concept distinct from gu. In such cases, he seemed to have in mind the emotive power that derives from the rhetorical structure of a literary text. The power of feng in this sense is similar to the Longinian idea of the grand style. The difference underlying the apparent similarity is more instructive, however, for feng is bound up with the vigor and vitality of a writer's personality, talent, and character. This vital force in the writer is designated by qi (vital force). Qi can be rendered in English as "energy," "vitality," "life force," "strength of character," and "brilliance of talent" in a writer- all of which animate his writing and emit, so to speak, a compelling emotive power. Despite the insistence on nourishing the vital force as a condition for powerful writing, this compelling power in Liu Xie is on the order more of rhetoric than of ethics. Liu Xie often depicted this power as a force flying and soaring to the clouds, as manifested in a huge bird of prey beating its wings in an upward flight. The images are embedded

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in a discussion of stylistic elements. In the opening lines of the chapter "Fenggu," he cautioned that too much verbal embellishments and rhetorical coloring weaken the power of a text. If a piece of writing is abundantly supplied with elegant phrasing, but lacks wind and bone to fly, then it loses all luster when it shows its coloration [ts'ai] and lacks the force to carry any resonance. Thus in composing one's reflections and in cutting a piece to pattern, it is essential to conserve a plenitude of ch'i. Only when its firm strength has become solid [slzih] will its radiance be fresh. We may compare its [wind and bone] function in literature to the way in which a bird of prey uses its wings. 23 This idea of rhetorical power fueled by the writer's vital force becomes clearer in Liu Xie's discussion of hO\\' past critics and writers attached too much importance to the relevance of the vital force to writing, and how differing amounts of vital force give rise to different styles. Liu Xie distinguished strong and weak styles by comparing the respective strength of the eagle and the pheasant. An eagle, though lacking beautiful plumage, can fly high on the strength of its bone structure and mighty vitality, whereas the pheasant, too fat and lacking in vigor, can fly only a hundred paces. Too much of both, however, may destroy the beauty of literary style: "If wind and bone lack bright coloration, we have a bird of prey roosting in the forest of letters. And if bright colors lack wind and bone, we have a pheasant hiding a>vay in the literary garden." 24 The vital force and its soaring flights in Liu Xie are kept within the bounds of stvlc and rhetoric. Li Zehou does not rest content with such a limited scope and tries to bring the vital force in line with his aesthetic and ethical preoccupations. He places Jcnggu in the familiar aesthetic dichotomy of feeling and reason. Both fcng and gu, he argues, are filled with the vital force, but feng belongs more to the outward form of art and is manifest in the outward expression of emotion and in the affective power of art on the audience. Thus, it is more formal and aesthetic and less constrained by ethical rules and social rationality. Gu, on the other hand, is linked with the reason of the subject, a form of rationality in conformity with Confucian political and moral doctrines. Without fcng as an outward expression, gu would remain bloodless doctrines and lose its aesthetic appeal. Without gu as an organizing principle, fcng may run out of control and become superfluous. Li places fcng and gu in a complementary relation, a relation that encompasses both ethical and aesthetic domains of writing. And

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since fenggu is also a descriptive term for a person in real life, it combines in one concept the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions of an individual. Li goes further than simply transforming a fundamentally rhetorical idea in Liu Xie into a broader category with enlarged ethical and aesthetic components. To work its compelling effect, fenggu must involve the vital force. The vital force is not only the physical and mental vitality of an individual writer. It is, rather, a force that pushes the subject to strive toward the unity of Truth and Goodness. The unity of Truth and Goodness in this context, as discussed above, is the correspondence between "things" and the "principles," that is, between historical events and Confucian moral principles. The subject's drive toward this moral goal is again interpreted as a form of active practice: the subject is engaged in a social and political enterprise. Li Zehou's aesthetics is grounded in the Marxist idea of human practice, in which the unity of human purpose and reality, of teleology and history, of freedom and necessity, gives rise to the beautiful, whereas the conflict between the two realms generates the sublime. In Li' s account of Liu Xie' s notion of fenggu, it is not difficult to hear the murmured subtext of this practice-oriented aesthetics. The surface text, however, is couched in the idiom of the Confucian classics. The vital force, Li argues, manifests a positive strand of Confucianism that valorizes the spirit of active engagement with worldly affairs. "Worldly affairs" in the Confucian tradition means the active participation of a Confucian scholar in the managing of the state as an appointed official. Just as beauty comes from the fact that human purposes somehow correspond to and are confirmed by the teleological movement of history, so the beauty of the vital force lies in the moral effort of a Confucian scholar-official in his official duty. The beautiful arises when his conduct and practice consort with the cosmic force imbued with a benign intelligence answerable to human designs. Li does not base the power of fenggu entirely on the Confucian idea of moral perfection. His aim seems to be to retrieve from the discourse of fenggu the traditional motifs similar to the idea of the sublime. Thus he manages to discover in Lu Xun' s writing a good example of the sublime, which he claims is the modern heir to the mode of writing endowed with elements of fenggu. It is not surprising that Li privileges the two texts of Lu Xun discussed in Chapter Two: "On the Power of Mara Poetry" and Wild Grass. Both texts can easily be read as proposing an identification of beauty with power, even though the

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second text seems to be concerned with how to recover a positive meaning out of the wilderness of non-meaning. To enrich this connection between the classical concept of fenggu and the modern sublime, Li Zehou tells us that Lu Xun was not only interested in Liu Xie's book, but even drew the image from the classical critic of "soaring flight" (fen fez), and used it as his pen-name 25 As far as such images are concerned, one has good reason to link Mao Zedong' s poetry with Lu Xun' s texts as belonging to the same discourse of the Chinese sublime. Mao's poetry is strewn with images of the gigantic bird flying with vigor and vitality high in the clouds and causing a raging cyclone in its wake. What makes this connection more intriguing is that Mao was chiefly responsible for making Lu Xun into a cultural and national hero of mythical proportions. 26 And both, the cultural hero and the political leader, have engaged theorists' attention in their efforts to create a Chinese theory of the sublime (Mao's place in the sublime is discussed in the last section of this chapter).

Education of tlze Senses The transformation of ordinary humanity to a sublime, moral perfection engages Li Zehou in his interpretation of the Kantian sublime andfenggu. To be strictly aesthetic, this transformation has to take account of the creaturely and sensuous dimensions of the human subject. Sense perception, feelings, emotion, intuition, biological needs, and impulses- all these are the proper domain of the aesthetic. As a conscientious scholar who reads Western aesthetics in the original, Li takes seriously the central category of the human senses. One of the chief task of aesthetics, he asserts, is to study the aesthetic feelings of the subject. This emphasis on sensibility persists throughout his discussions of the categories of imagination, empathy, typicality, artistic creativity, and others. Since the early 1980's he has made fresh and ambitious attempts to construct a theory of human subjectivity centered on the human senses. The renewed interest in the human senses was a major concern of writers who sang the "discovery of human beings" in China in the 1980's. For a long time, aesthetic thinking and literary discourse refused or was afraid to treat the human senses and feelings on their own as attributes of the human. A man or woman was considered as a member of a class, a collective, a political organization, or a bloodless sign of a certain social formation and institution. The guiding princi-

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pie for critics in approaching the human senses can be glimpsed and summarized, without exaggeration, in a remark of Mao Zedong' s in the famous Yen'an Talk: "There is absolutely no such thing in the world as love or hatred without reason or cause." 27 Any feeling should be class-bound and class-specific. With the loosening of political and ideological controls after the Cultural Revolution and with the increasing momentum for economic reform, discontent with such ideas quickly surged into huge tidal waves in theoretical debates, literary criticism, and literary production. Liu Zaifu called for a return to humans as the central mission of literature, and in numerous manifesto articles he intoned the same refrain: the human, the subjectivity of literature, individuality, emotion, and personality. 28 This is the intellectual ambience surrounding Li Zehou' s attempt at constructing a theory of the human subject. Calling his project the "construction of a new mode of sensibility" (jianli xi1z gmzxing) he focuses on the complexity of the human senses.29 His aim is the reconstruction of the collective psyche in such a way that it is freed from crude sensuous needs and thus becomes humanized. Li works out his theory in three ways: by a critique of Kant and Zhu Guangqian, by drawing on the humanist notions in Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and by developing the concept of" sedimentation." Li Zehou's reconsideration of the subject and the human senses is a critical reaction to the dominant ideology and contains radically subversive elements. It is indeed good news that with the promotion of human sensibility to prominence we move from the stern orthodox theorist to one inclined to smile tenderly and sympathetically on the innermost, the most betrayed and trampled aspect of the individual in modern China. But a critical reading may suggest that this softening in the name of the human subject is more apparent than real. Li critiques Kant by drawing on the humanist notions in Marx's 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. Marx's suggestions about the importance of the human senses were taken up and developed by the later Marxists. In particular, the Frankfurt School attempted to make up for the lack in classical Marxism of interest in "what happens in the human head." 30 The fusion of Marxism and psychoanalysis, a major achievement of the Frankfurt School that may prove to be a fruitful line of inquiry about the human subject, does not seem to engage much of Li' s attention. Li' s theory is a story of how the human can cultivate and refine his or her sensibility until it is refined out of

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existence. It is, in other words, a narrative of how, through the aesthetic modeling of sense perception, the crudely sensuous can be sublimated into social rationality and the collective superego. Li's theory is formulated through a critique of the notion of the subject as a self-contained, self-conscious, individual entity. This Kantian notion forms the basis of Zhu Guangqian' s theory of the autotelic, disinterested aesthetic experience. Li seeks to release the subject from its "subjective," individualistic, or even biological imprisonment and to redefine it as a socially and historically constituted agent. Li explores the theoretical possibilities of Marx's Manuscripts to support his argument. Yet his use of the Manuscripts is an appropriation fraught with ideological consequences. Much of Li' s analysis is an extended comment on Marx's remark "The cultivation of the five senses is a labor of the whole previous history of the world." 31 Since the human senses are not isolated or biological organs but are constituted by culture, social institutions, productive processes, and material practice in a certain historical epoch, the aesthetic experience cannot be understood apart from these formative socio-historical factors. For Li, aesthetic categories such as human imagination, intuition, empathy, and artistic typicality are determined by these socio-historical factors, and he evokes Marx's concept of human nature as a particular product of history. Just as this concept is powerful in Marx's critique of the commodified and reified human senses in capitalist production- and its theoretical counterpart, the isolated and disinterested senses of the aesthetic subject in idealism-so it also proves effective in Li's criticism of Zhu Guangqian's "idealist" aesthetic theory. But in his zeal to correct Zhu, Li makes the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts much more reductive. Li so emphasizes the social and historical dimensions that the subject dissolves into an empty cipher of social relations and determinations. Although Marx indeed construed the human senses as a product of society, he did not see them as necessarily tied, in a causal relation or once and for all, to social structures and productive processes. By deploring the alienated conditions of the human senses, Marx suggested the dire fact that the human senses are tied to the capitalist process of production in an inhuman way. This is exemplified by the alienated worker, whose senses are impoverished to crude needs, and by the profit-seeking capitalist, whose senses are reduced to the mere "sense of having." This calls for redress and revolutionary transformation.

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As critics have noted, two conceptions of the human and the human senses are at work in Marx's text. The first is the Schillerian concept of the universal human being, whose sensuous capacities should be fulfilled in aesthetic existence. "Man appropriates to himself his manifold essence in an all-sided way, thus as a whole man." 32 The other is the notion of the human as the product of economic and social determinations, now in a historically specific case as an alienated being caught in a dehumanizing social and productive process. We can see these two conceptions in a passage from which Li Zehou frequently quotes. Marx stated in an aesthetic vein that the objective world should be an extension of the human senses and sensuous capacities, but these human attributes may also become the products of a reality that subordinates them to its sway. My object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential capacities and can therefore only be so for me insofar as my essential capacity exists explicitly as a subjective capacity, because the meaning of an object for me reaches only as far as my senses go ... for this reason the senses of social man differ from those of the unsocial. Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature is the wealth of the subjective human sensibility either cultivated or created- a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human gratification, confirming themselves as essential human capacities. For not only the five senses but also the so-called spiritual and moral senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense and the humanity of the senses come into being only through the existence of their object, through nature humanized. The development of the five senses is a labor of the whole previous history of the world. Sense subordinated to crude, practical need has only a narrow meaning. For the starving man food does not exist in its human form but only in its abstract character as food. 33 Objects are external correlatives of the human senses, things that confirm and answer to humans as unalienated beings. On the other hand, human senses can also be warped by a certain life pattern and become "subordinated to crude, practical need," just as a starving man's senses are desperately geared toward relieving his hunger. The distinction between the two conceptions of the human senses, the one aesthetic and the other historical, is couched in two distinct economic metaphors. The alienated worker is a poor, starving man eager to swallow crude food like an animal. The all-around man is a rich man, man in the "entire wealth of his being," the rich, deep, and sensitive man enjoying the wealth of his sensuous delight.

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The enduring attraction of Marx's Manuscripts lies in its success in freeing the senses from the prison house of atomistic, individual space as conceived by idealists. Marx released the senses into the historical field and redefined them as shaped by social practice. This theoretical advance provides a critique of capitalism, for it penetrates to the reason, historically explainable and hence material, why the individual can no longer feel, taste, and touch and thus falls short of potential human capacities. But as Eagleton points out, "This judicious curbing of idealist subjectivity is, ironically, all in the name of the subject; the only point of recalling that subject's objective character is so as the better to comprehend the political preconditions within which subjective powers may be exercised as sheer ends in themselves." 34 In other words, to understand the material conditions shaping the human senses is not to freeze sensibility in its current shape, but to reveal the historical necessity of dismantling those alienating conditions, so that human beings can come to their senses again. Thus, the image of the human being who lives with full powers and the entire range of senses is projected onto the" coming society" of Communism. Marx's materialist analysis of the human senses belongs to a different order of discourse from his idea, or ideal, of the all-around human being. One is a method of interpretation, a hermeneutic discourse. The other is a radical revolutionary program and concerns the utopian aim of his political agenda. However much we may criticize Marx as a romantic humanist or utopian, there is reason to argue that the separation between these two components is one reason why Marxism, or certain strands of Marxism, appears to be impersonal, inhuman, and mechanistic. In my view, this is especially so with certain trends in Chinese Marxism. What in Marx was an analysis of the material conditioning of the alienated senses is too often turned into a justification for the status quo, which is believed, a priori, to determine human sensibility. An interpretive method developed to analyze the estrangement of the senses in capitalism has been reified as a world in which the human senses must necessarily be shaped by socialist reality. I believe that Li Zehou's analysis of the subject is still grounded in such a historical a priori- a conception of socioeconomic totality believed to substantiate and shape the subject. His theory fails to give adequate consideration to the subject and the human senses. The human senses are indeed socially and culturally conditioned, but they are not determined by social and cultural forces. The political consequence of cultural determinism is the erasure of the individual

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into the social and collective. A discussion of the human senses and the human subject must do justice to that unique, irreducible constellation of the private and cultural we call the self. A complete socialization of the senses sounds totalitarian. The positive thrust of the aesthetic is precisely to stake out a ground for the playful delight of the senses on their own. Li' s insistence on the socially conditioned senses is clear in his critique of Zhu Guangqian's notion of beauty. For Zhu, the beautiful arises through the subject's disinterested contemplation of forms, which is cut loose from practical interests and intellectual associations. This contemplation displays a childlike naivete and simplicity. This Kantian notion, Li argues, reduces human senses to the narrowly biological function of a child. A small child's uncultured and untutored sense perception, if it has any, is unable to appreciate the beautiful because it is capable only of "low and primitive" perception.3s By relegating the child's perception to "biological" and hence low-level capacity, Li is positing on the opposite pole the cultural, which for him is a property only of the educated and socially mature adult. In his analysis Li uses a strategy that constantly posits sharp polarities. A good example is pleasure and aesthetic perception. Li endorses physical pleasure as a precondition of aesthetic experience by describing how the phenomenal world smiles and strikes favorably on our bodily surfaces. A stroll in a natural setting, pure and clean air, soothing sunshine, and so on all give us pleasure. But "pleasure," he cautions, "is physiological and generates only our physical wellbeing, whereas the aesthetic experience is spiritual and gives rise to mental enjoyment" (Meixue lunji, p. 12). Biology can explain the first; sociology is the proper means of explaining the second (Meixue lunji, p. 13). One of Li's favorite examples of a sharp polarity is taken from Marx, who pitted aesthetically pleasing food against the food in its "crude" form, and the aesthetically sensitive man against the starving man. For a starving man, food satisfies his "animalistic" needs and does not assume a "human" form (Meixue lunji, p. 13). Both the animalistic and the human are associated with another polarity: the social man's senses are radically different from those of "non-social man," and underlying the social and non-social the two pairs of nature versus culture and sense versus reason. The list could be extended. Li relies on these sets of sharply opposing terms and allows little traffic between them. In the Western tradition of rhetoric, this anti-

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thetical structure is called chiasmus, a rhetorical structure seen by Paul de Man as salient in Schiller's texts.% The link with Schiller is significant, not only because Li Zehou is operating within the familiar dichotomous conceptual structures of Western philosophy and writes in a form of Westernized Chinese, but also because he is greatly enamored of Schiller's writing and philosophy. A typical chiasmus reads like this: "Eating is not just to satisfy hunger, but should become fine dining; sexual intercourse is not just mating, but is to become love." 37 Or: "The physical existence of the five sense organs enable them to express pleasure; the social existence of the senses gives rise to aesthetic experiences" (Meintc lzmji, p. 13). At times Li allows some commerce between these sharply antithetical terms, and it is far from his purpose to keep one at a dualistic distance from the other. As a good Hegelian-Marxist dialectician, he is interested in how one term is linked to the other. The term used to link the polarities is unity. The aesthetic existence of man, he contends, is a unity in conflict. Aesthetic inquiry concerns the relation of" conflictual unity between nature and man.":~s This relation extends to other conceptual pairs by implication: the unity of animal and human, the individual and the collective, subjective and objective, feeling and reason, nature and culture. The same principle unifies biological, sensual pleasure and the aesthetic taste of the educated senses: "The physical existence of the five senses creates pleasure; the social existence of the senses gives rise to aesthetic experience. This unity linking the two allows one to contain the other in itself" (Meixue lu11ji, p. 13). Although Li appears to pay equal attention to both terms in what he calls his "dualistic notion of the aesthetic," taking account of both the physical and socializ':'d senses, 39 in fact he does not place the two terms on an equal footing. The human senses on their own belong to the biological, animalistic, and subjective and are posited as a term only to be transformed, superseded, and overcome by the other terms, so that they become the cultured sense organs. Fostering aesthetic sensibility is a gradual triumph over the animal senses and is assumed to be the work of culture, of social progress and history. Thus although the physical senses may contain their social nature and vice versa, The rapid development of society enables man and his five senses to develop at an unprecedented speed in the direction of the social, so that the social character of the senses takes far greater ascendancy and assumes mastery over the other. This is why we say that man's

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aesthetic perception is the product of world history and the mark of human culture and spiritual complexion. The works by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Beethoven, Qu Yuan, and Cao Xueqin are artistic and material proof of this mark. (Meixue lunji, p. 13) In this process of artistic enjoyment and creation, the senses are gradually stripped of their physically contingent character and become cultivated, trained, and, to use a word that sounds ominous, programmed. Contemporary critics wary of inscriptions, domination, and control over the body by a political structure may abhor this privileging of the cultural programming of the senses, and Li Zehou is well aware of the dangers of the total control of cultural and social institutions over the body. At one point in his critique of Kant, he warns against an extreme idea of the social, which is here synonymous with culture. It is wrong, he says, to conceive of social consciousness as something purely rational, set over against the sensuous existence and emotional life of the individual. We cannot define the human in terms of such an idea of the social. On the contrary, this notion actually describes the alienation of human nature by some superimposed external power, such as God, and can be found in such social formations and ideological practices as religious faith and asceticism, or in the labor process in which the human being is enslaved to the machine. This dehumanizing control over the human body by external social structures is not just a disease of capitalism: the nightmares of the Kafkaesque total control of body and mind during the bleak times in contemporary China were not far from Li' s mind as he made these statements. 40 Li's solution is to propose again the harmonious unity of feeling and reason, of individual and social, of sensuous capacity and rationality. In this unity the sensuous and rational are not just thrown together, suspended between "the half-angelic and half-demonic," but an interpenetration of the two into an inseparable whole. 41

Sedimentation and Programmed Sensibility On what basis, one has to ask, can he unify the two terms? Here again, in his attempt to unify the sensuous and the rational, the individual and the social, nature and culture, Li unifies by subordinating the first set of terms to the second set, folding the sensuous or the emotional into the rational. The unification is made through the concept of what Li calls

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sedimentation (;idia11), a term that has attained wide currency not only in aesthetic and critical writing but also in public discourse. What motivated the invention of this concept, by Li's account, was the question of the division of the aesthetic experience behveen the sensuous and the rational and the need to articulate how the rational can be realized and manifested in the sensuous, how the general can be fleshed out in the particular. In Li's dichotomous scheme, the rational is consonant with the social, the historical, and the collective. It involves ethical norms that a culture holds up as universal and by which a dominant social system sustains itself. Since it is undesirable to have suprasensory rationality superimposed on the sensuous and the bodily, social norms and rational principles must be made to penetrate and infiltrate the sensuous, individual realm through the aesthetic detour of sedimentation. The concept of sedimentation, although latent in Li' s writings in the 1950's, is given a full articulation in Li' s analysis of the totemic images and designs on arhvorks of Stone Age tribal cultures in his influential Stages on the ~Vay to Beauty (Mei de liclzeng). Li notices that the totemic images, although bearing mimetic traces of real animals and events, have already been abstracted as geometrical forms and lines, like those frequently seen on ancient pottery. But these abstract forms, shapes, and lines are not purely formalistic. Since they are representational creations of primitive peoples engaged in ritualistic and magic activities, they are impregnated with the meaning, value, and emotion attendant on these symbolic creations and thus filled with social and ideational contents. These meanings, values, and emotions, although conceptually indeterminate within the images, have over time been deposited, d;ssolved, sedimented, and crystallized into geometrical patterns. These forms are stripped of the material density of the original mimetic contents. Taking a cue from Clive Bell, Li writes that beauty is the "significant form," in which structures of meaning and feeling grounded in social life are sedimented in aesthetically appealing forms.42 Thus described, sedimentation is an anthropological process. It easily obscures the politically charged duality behveen the senses and social rationality, even as it masks its aesthetic-political agenda. Sedimentation functions as a persistent metaphor in Li' s text to define the relationship between the senses and reason, the individual and the social, nature and culture, the particular and the general, always giving the second term the upper hand over the first. For him, aesthetic per-

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ception is both sensuous and suprasensory; it is the suprasensory dissolved in the sensuous. The dissolution, to cite a variation of the sedimentation metaphor, is like the dissolving of salt in water, where the salt is imperceptible to the eye but not to the taste. 43 In this case salt is to water as reason is to poetry or as the rational to the sensuous. Speaking of the Kantian distinction among aesthetic pleasure, feeling, and judgment, he avers that the three terms can be subsumed under the rubric of aesthetic judgment, because aesthetic judgment is not subject to individual subjective vagaries but is based on a social structure of meaning and value common to all members of society. 44 What Li is proposing is in fact an aesthetic that not only grants priority to reason over the senses and the social over the individual but also advocates the mastery of the former over the latter. This aesthetic dominated by social rationality permits only certain senses to be classed as properly "aesthetic" senses. The palate, the senses of smell and touch, the sense organs for bodily pleasure and sex- all these are too animalistic and too dependent on the vagaries of individual whims and needs, and thus too opaque and intransigent to totalizing reason. Li is not unaware of the peril in embracing such a totalizing reason. He concedes at several points in his Four Talks on Aesthetics (Meixue si Jiang) that the aesthetic experience is subjectively contingent and heterogeneous, ungraspable and undeterminable by the intellect. It involves complex workings of feeling, perception, understanding, and imagination. But these operations, he quickly adds, are not simply psychological but should be made amenable to an ordering in terms of mathematical formulas. With the proposal of a mathematical ordering of sensuous experiences, the politically most ominous aspect of Li's idea comes to the fore. His attempt to construct a new form of sensibility reads like a project of hegemony in the precise sense of the term. The concept of hegemony denotes the dream state of the ruling order. In it, the ruling power and its rational system of legitimation are founded, not as a coercive power superimposed from the outside on the individual, but as something resembling inner nature, imprinted, deposited, internalized, and "sedimented" on the very pulse, gaze, and feeling of the individual and lived out by him or her in the full delight of consent and freedom. Li writes that the concept of sedimentation refers to "the social, rational, and historical elements as they accumulate, deposit, and become something private, sensuous, and immediate."45 The sensuous

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and the rational, the individual and the social, are indeed unified in sedimentation, but all in the name of the last. Man is precisely the unity of the biological and supra-biological. The difference is that in the cognitive and ethical realms the suprabiological often takes the form of rationality lodged in the sensuous, whereas in the aesthetic realm the rational presents itself as sedimented sensuous patterns. In cognitive and intellectual structures, the supra-biological manifests itself so that sensuous life and social constraints become internalized as reason. In the realm of ethics and Will, the supra-biological reveals itself as integrated reason exerting constraints over the sensuous. Both in fact show the superiority of the supra-biological over the biological. This is not true in the aesthetic realm. Here the supra-biological has completely dissolved into the sensuous. It reaches out far and wide and is even present in our daily empirical experiences. Its essence is a delightful freedom .... The sensuous is fraught with the rational, the individual is shot through with history, nature is filled with the social. The supra-biological is in the sensuous but is not simply sensuous; it exists in forms but is not merely formal. This is the profound meaning of humanization of nature and the foundation of the aesthetic. In other words, the totality of the social and rational finally is realized in the individual, in the natural and the sensuous. 46 This total domination or colonization of social rationality over the senses is seen as a work of history and a gradual process. What accomplishes this historical task is the engineering of the human soul and the cultivation of the senses. Li Zehou feels no qualms in using the dreaded phrase "engineers of the human soul" (renlei linghun de gongc/1eng shi), in whose name the most outrageous mental torture and injury have been inflicted on millions of Chinese during the numerous political campaigns of purge and purification. The engineering of the human soul is the task of artists and writers. The soul is not the soul of a petty self, but a grand self, the self of a human community. 47 Although we should grant the soul or sensuous existence of the individual some measure of validity and independence, we should also transform the petty self into the grand collective self. The private self seems too close to chaotic desires, animalistic drives, and biological needs. On the other hand, the grand self is built on rational systems and social norms that give substance to individual identity. This engineering, in Freudian terms, is the sublimation of the libidinal to social structures, which are internalized in the subject as the superego. In

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other words, it is a production of the subject of ideology, such that the ideological subject can, in Althusser' s phrase, work" all by itself." Li Zehou's account of the relation between the senses and reason can be seen as an allegory, in the guise of a theoretical presentation, of the relationship supposed to obtain between the individual and the social order in a hegemonic political structure. His aesthetic account resounds with echoes of Mao Zedong's remarks on the ideal political order to a party conference in 1957. Mao said that the political goal of the party was to "build a lively political environment in which there is both centralization and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both totality of will and the felt delight of the individual." 48 Li might balk at this somewhat abrupt yoking of Mao's political ideal and his aesthetic theory, but political concern is not far removed from his aesthetic reflection. This is evident not only in the declared agenda of his aesthetic project as the construction of a "spiritual culture" going hand in hand with socialist modernization, but also in his repeated claim that Schiller's aesthetic theory is politically oriented and that we have much more to learn from him than from Hegel. 49

The Sublime Maker of History Kant's analytic of the sublime has been a theoretical background against which Chinese aestheticians have formulated a Chinese version of the sublime. But in recent years, theoretical attention has turned to Friedrich Schiller, whose work has inspired a large amount of theoretical and interpretive effort from Chinese aestheticians and critics. The reason is not hard to find. As an aesthetic thinker, Schiller was unabashedly political and able to address questions of political power through the language and program of aesthetics. Schiller's theory of the sublime, with the stress on the supremacy of reason and morality over man's sensuous nature, holds much attraction for the attempt to justify the strict ethical imperative of the State to the exclusion of whatever is heterogeneous and" other" to it. A recent study on the sublime in Schiller is a case in point. In a Chinese anthology of aesthetic studies published in 1986, an essay by the aesthetician Zhang Yuneng deals with the question of the sublime in both the Western and the Chinese contexts. In discussing two essays by Schiller, "On the Sublime" and "Of the Sublime," Zhang tries to salvage what has been neglected in Schiller's theory of the sublime. He suggests that Schiller's work is a valorization of the

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perfected subject as a rational and ethical being engaged in a constant struggle to shed biologically and naturally conditioned human attributes. This process of perfection is an educational task to be accomplished through the cultivation of both the beautiful and the sublime- a point that alludes to Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education. Recapitulating Schiller's argument, Zhang writes that since our mission is to follow the law of the absolute spirit regardless of finite and sensuous constraints, the sublime should be allied with the beautiful to become an integral part of aesthetic education. The aim of this education is to extend the sensibility of the mind beyond the sensuous world and render the mind fully adequate to its suprasensory, rational mission. Zhang quotes Schiller to explain why both categories are useful in shaping the subject: "Without the beautiful there would be a ceaseless quarrel between our natural and rational vocations." Without a ready appreciation for the beautiful, the human being would be forever enmeshed in creaturely and biological constraints and would forsake human dignity. On the other hand, if there were no sublime force to propel us into action and enterprise, we would be enfeebled by indulgences in the sensuous realm of the beautiful, and we would forget and abandon our dignity, vigor, and vitality as ethical and spiritual beings. so Zhang then characterizes aesthetic education as part of the teleological movement from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. The problem with Schiller's conception of this process, he says, is Schiller's idealist notion of abstract human nature and pure intellect. It is as if the pure intellect were perfectly able to strive for its own perfection through alternating engagements with the beautiful and the sublime. What is lacking in Schiller's theory of the sublime, Zhang points out, is a vision of history as conceived in terms of Marxist historical materialism. Historical materialism regards humans as socially and historically constructed beings. Human beings are caught in a situation of alienation and reification in the capitalist stage of social development. Yet they can transform the society of alienation and strive toward fulfilling their human potentials. Under the leadership of certain enlightened individuals who have awakened to a consciousness of the teleological movement of history, proletarians can make revolution, smash the capitalist apparatus, transform the state of alienated labor, and move toward a realm of freedom. As is characteristic in Chinese appropriations of Western discourse, Zhang thus recasts the sublime within the grand narrative of historical material-

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ism and presses it into the service of Communist ideology. He goes on to claim that the sublime is a form of historical necessity that is at work in Chinese socialism. In the grand and unprecedented campaigns and constructions waged by the Chinese people to make China a strong, socialist, modern nation, says Zhang, there are numerous and brilliant manifestations of the sublime. Among ordinary workers and peasants there are countless heroes who display a sublime personality and energy as they participate in the heroic struggle to change the face of heaven and earth. They are superhuman models who inspire us with a sense of awe and grandeur and encourage us to stride forward heroically and vigorously. 51 In Schiller's essays Zhang has discovered an educational and doctrinal tool that can be used to shape individuals into the Subject of History in general and the loyal subject of the partystate in particular. The sublime in contemporary Chinese aesthetic theory can thus be characterized as the aesthetics of the Subject of History. It is an aesthetics of the hero and hero worship. The image of the hero can be better appreciated if we consider the archetypal figure of the Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains (yugong yi shan) in political discourse. In a speech with the same title delivered to the seventh national congress of the Chinese Communist party, Mao invoked a fable from a classical text of Daoism. An old man lived in north China in ancient times and was called the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. There were two huge mountains in front of his house, blocking his way and vision. With great determination, the old man, hoe in hand, led his sons in digging up the two mountains. An old scholar heard about their project and ridiculed them. lt is impossible, he said, for the old man and his sons to remove the mountains. The old man retorted forcefully that after he died, his sons would carry on, as would their sons after them; the work of successive generations would one day clear away the two mountains. The persistence of the old man and his sons eventually moved god, who sent two fairies to carry the mountains away on their backs. Mao used this example to inspire party members to move the two mountains confronted by the Chinese revolution: feudalism and imperialism. Mao asserted that if we follow the old man's example, we will also move god, who is none other than the People. 5 2 Thus the old man who moved the mountains became associated witl1 the people's power to transform the world, a power mythologized in Mao's text and party discourse, and often deployed as a sublime motif in contemporary Chinese culture.

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Not only does Mao Zedong's political writing provide numerous figures and images that are described as chonggao, but his poems have also been an ample source of examples for Chinese theorists constructing a Chinese theory of the sublime. In a recent article on the sublime that examines Mao's works on art, politics, and philosophy, Cai Zi'e claims that the sublime is the core of Mao's thinking about aesthetics and art, and he uses Mao's poems to illustrate his theory. 53 Taking a cue from Cai, I will show that Mao's poetry is indeed the most compelling realization in poetic terms of an aesthetic ideal of the sublime grounded in the teleological vision of history. Over his revolutionary career of some sixty years Mao wrote many poems, which were collected into numerous anthologies in Chinese and Western languages. These poems were widely read, recited, and studied in China during the Cultural Revolution and their literary quality was judged good by critics of various political persuasions. The subject matter covers a wide and varied spectrum of revolutionary experiences in modern China. They depict the Red Army threatened by enormous odds and vanquishing the enemy, the revolutionary masses accomplishing epic, awe-inspiring feats in building the new nation, the monumental technological wonders that the People erected on nature, magnificent and sublime scenes of nature covered in snow, dizzying views from mountain peaks, torrential rivers and stormy seas, the heroic fortitude and defiance of the Chinese in the face of imperialist powers, and so on. These poems are written in the elevated style of classical verse and ring with a compelling cadence when read out loud. Mao's poems articulate a sublime heroics. It is characteristic of the sublime that there is a moment that may be sinister, threatening, or dangerous, and that tends to throw the apprehending subject off balance. This disruptive moment is, as I have suggested, the center of attention for Western theorists and critics addressing the sublime. For instance, Gary Stonum's analysis of the sublime in Dickinson's poems and Neil Hertz's important essay on the moment of "blockage" in the literature of the sublime attest to the importance of this moment.54 Many of Mao's poems characteristically begin with an uncertain and sinister, if not disruptive, moment. For example, one of the bestknown poems, "Snow" ("Xue"), begins: North country scene: A hundred leagues locked in ice, A thousand leagues of whirling snow.

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Both sides of the Great Wall One single white immensity. The Yellow River's swift current Is stilled from end to end. The mountains dance like silver snakes And the highlands charge like wax-hued elephants, Vying with heaven in stature.ss There is a chilling and impersonal grandeur in this snow-clad scene of north China. The whirling snow and frozen river suggest the indifferent power of nature, and an awesome sense of human beings dwarfed by immense nature is intimated in the summary line "One single white immensity." Several lines in this poem readily conjure up canonically sublime images and associations familiar to Western critics of sublime texts: vastness, immensity, a white and blank expanse and stillness, clashing inhuman forces. On the other hand, in these lines the awesome and the sinister are minimized. The beauty of this vast land and magnificent space seem to beckon the viewer. Although the viewer may pay homage to such a white, overwhelming immensity for a moment, he or she quickly identifies with the vastness of nature and appropriates its magnificence for the empowerment of subjectivity and self-aggrandizement: This land so rich in beauty Has made countless heroes bow in homage. (Poems, p. 24) These heroes, the poet goes on to say, are the monarchs who, over the past 2,000 years, have tried to emulate the power and magnificence of mountains, rivers, and seas for their self-empowerment as the magnificent imperial subject, the son of heaven. But none of those emperors can be compared with the heroes of today: But alas' Chin Shih-huang and Han Wu-ti Were lacking in literary grace, And Tang Tai-tsung and Sun Tai-tsu Had little poetry in their souls; And Genghis Khan, Proud son of Heaven for a day, Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched. All are past and gone! For truly great men Look to this age alone. (Poems, p. 24)

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The emperors listed are well-known figures elevated to legendary and mythical proportions in Chinese literature and history. But the poet suggests explicitly that they are uncouth barbarians and intellectual and spiritual dwarfs. The truly great heroes can be found in the present age. Mao was a powerful statesman and had monarchic status as paramount leader of China. He was also an outstanding poet and was quite proud of that, as his well-known public pose as friend and teacher of many Chinese poets shows. Mao's persona in "Snow" obviously conveys the notion that he is a gigantic figure towering over all the past emperors. What the poet sees as missing in the great emperors is literary grace and the ability to write poetry. The" great men" in the text should thus be read in the singular, since the phrase really refers to the great statesman-poet Mao Zedong himself. "The truly great men" of this age can, of course, be read in the plural in many other poems by Mao. The subjects that figure in Mao's poems are predominantly those who represent the forces of revolution: Red Army soldiers, peasants, workers, and martyrs. These figures also represent the People as the makers and the driving force of history. The poem "Farewell to the God of Plague" ("Song wenshen"), for example, begins with a bleak description of the epidemic of schistosomiasis that plagued the land: "Hundreds of villages choked with weeds, men wasted away;/ Thousands of homes deserted, ghosts chanted mournfully" (Poems, p. 34). In the second stanza, the terrible disease is wiped out, and the initial picture of bleak desolation and destruction is overcome by the triumphant efforts of millions of people who, like the mythological figures Yao and Shun, are capable of ordering mountains and rivers about. Six hundred million in this land all equal to Yao and Shun. Crimson rain swirls in waves under our will, Green mountains turn to bridges at our wish. Gleaming mattocks fall on the Five Ridges heaven-high; Mighty arms move to rock the earth round the Triple River. (Poems, p. 35) Here again we have the image of the Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains- in the plural. Incarnated in this image is the collective subjectivity called forth and articulated by the Communist ideology of the telos of history and realized in revolutionary cam-

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paigns. This is also a subject-position that seems to be poised on a sublime and mythical height but is nevertheless the position to which everyone is exhorted to aspire. To understand this, one has only torecall the numerous heroes and heroines in the literature of socialist realism, who are always the "typical character arising out of the typical circumstances," yet who are also invariably larger than life because they embody the essence of history. They are able to feel the pulsations of historical evolution and are always on the leading edge of historical tides. They are couched sometimes in the image of vanguards of the army, sometimes in the image of the Locomotive Engine of History, and sometimes, with specific reference to Mao, as the Helmsman of the Revolutionary Ship. One might recall in this regard the numerous models both of altruistic commitment to collective goals and of saintly self-sacrifice held up by the party state's ideological discourse for average Chinese to emulate over the past four decades. This sublime subjectivity of history is valorized, not to constitute and nurture aggressive and superhuman individuals (although ideological maniacs indeed are frequently produced as a side effect), but to center and unify the loose contingency of individual experience and heterogeneity of subject-positions in the interest of total control. Terry Eagleton observes that in bourgeois aesthetics the sublime, no less than the beautiful, serves the ideological purpose of forming a subject in the phallic law of social order. The beautiful centers the "subject in an imaginary relation to a pliable, purposive reality," thereby granting it a sense of its inner coherence that extends to an illusive outer harmony. The sublime, on the other hand, functions to "discipline and chastise the subject/' recalling it traumatically and violently to a higher law, which is then found to be inscribed in its very being. 56 A parallel situation can be found in contemporary Chinese aesthetic discourse. Here the beautiful is always treated as the sensuous appearance of Truth and Goodness, thus granting the subject a delightful sense of harmony between inner coherence and outer reality. The sublime, however, functions to recall the subject to a lofty sense of its historical mission as the maker and motor of history. To legitimate its political rule and ideological hegemony, the party-state needs to recruit faithful subjects. Communist ideology in its doctrinaire form is too abstract and faceless to "interpellate" (in Althusser's term) the masses. The beautiful in this case serves to give ideology a personal and human face, thereby granting and ensuring a unified subjectivity or identity. Yet the subject cannot always remain snug

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and complacent within its already established identity and subjectivity. For its ceaseless revolutionary campaigns and struggles to effect change in the world, the party-state needs subjects unafraid of destroying their old identity to forge a new one. As Mao said repeatedly, in the process of transforming the world, the proletariat must transform themselves. The sublime embodies the abstract telos of history and inspires the people with daunting and awe-inspiring figures: the mythical figure of the Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains, saintly revolutionary martyrs, exemplary figures in everyday life, the sacred mass of the People, and above all the towering, superman figure of Mao Zed on g. It should come as no surprise that the Schillerian brand of the sublime is privileged in Chinese aesthetic discourse, rather than aversion of the sublime fraught with disruption and danger. Aesthetics in Schiller, as Paul de Man observes, is the popularization of philosophy. It belongs to culture and to the state. 57 In Chinese aesthetic discourse, the sublime is the aestheticization of the Communist ideology of History as an inevitable and irresistible dialectical progression from alienation to the fullest development of human potential, from socialism to Communism, and in the case of China, from a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country to a strong industrialized nation-state. The politics of forging a national and political identity is here implicated in the aesthetics of the sublime in order to produce more and more heroes of revolution and subjects of the state. Just as Chairman Mao is a statesman-poet, the party-state is an aesthetic state. Aesthetics in general and the sublime in particular justify and legitimate the state. The statesman is an artist, too. The people are for him what stone is for the sculptor. Leader and masses are as little of a problem for each other as color is a problem for the painter. Politics are the plastic arts of the state, as painting is the plastic art of color. Therefore politics without the people or against the people are nonsense. To transform a mass into a people and a people into a state-that has always been the deepest sense of a genuine political task. 58 In this quote one can easily hear echoes of many of Mao's writings and talks on art and literature. The analogy comes as a sobering reminder of how far the ideological function of the sublime can be pushed. In his essay "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," the French philosopher Jean-Franv a slide show in which a crowd of onlookers watch the execution of a Chinese spy in the service of the Russians. The onlookers, who are mostly Chinese, rejoice in this scene of execution, as if intoxicated. What made this scene even more absurd was that the slides were shown right after ones illustrating the appearance and forms of germs. Whether Lu Xun intended it or not, the close proximity of the germs to the unthinking mob certainly elicits a sense of affinity and thus generates a strong grotesque effect. 36 The unthinking herd of spectators who morbidly rejoiced in the blood and cruelty of the execution remained a source of artistic creation for Lu Xun, to which he persistently returned and gave varied grotesque treatment in his fiction. We encounter a similar mob in "The True Story of Ah Q" ("A Q zheng zhuan"). While being marched to his execution through a watching crowd who loudly cheer him, Ah Q tries to play the hero bv singing the lyrics of a local opera. Suddenly he finds that the cheering onlookers have metamorphosed into eyes, which resemble the eyes of a blood-thirsty wolf he once encountered. "He had never forgotten that v·mlf's eyes, fierce yet cowardly, gleaming like two will-o' -the-wisps, as if boring into him from a distance. Now he saw eyes more terrible even than the wolfs: dull yet penetrating eyes that having devoured his words still seemed eager to devour something beyond his flesh and blood. And these eyes kept following him at a set distance" (1: 526). This fusion of beastly traits and the human body also gives shape to the curious crowd wih1essing an execution scene in the story "Medicine" ("Yao"). Old Shuan, a character in the story, goes to the

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execution ground to seek a steamed bun soaked in the blood of the executed, in the hopes of curing his son of tuberculosis. The therapy seems absurd enough, but Old Shuan's action fits the sinister atmosphere of the execution scene, with its strongly surreal quality, very well. In the darkness the human characters are stripped of distinctive human shapes; they move around like ghosts or specters. Old Shuan "saw several men passing. One of them even turned back to look at him, and although he could not see him clearly, the man's eyes shone with a lustful light, like a famished person's at the sight of food" (1: 441). "Then he looked around and saw many strange people, in twos and threes, wandering about like lost souls. However, when he gazed steadily at them, he could not see anything else strange about them" (1: 441 ). Shortly afterward, these shadowy specters gather around the scene of execution. Old Shuan "could only see people's backs. Craning their necks as far as they would go, they looked like so many ducks, held and lifted by some invisible hand" (1: 441). One of the executioners asks Old Shuan to pay while thrusting a steamed bun dripping with blood at him. The grotesque is intensified when Old Shuan carries the blood-soaked steamed bun home. He carries it" as if it were the sole heir to an ancient house. Nothing else mattered now. He was about to transplant this new life to his own home and reap much happiness" (1: 442). This brief episode is perhaps the most grotesque moment in Lu Xun's fiction. "Medicine" is far from being a story of fantasy and monsters, nor is it constructed in a realistic vein. The verisimilitude often trembles on the verge of the unreat and the realistically delineated scenes are shot through with glimpses of insanity, madness, and fantasy. The onlookers, like those in "The True Story of Ah Q," are defamiliarized into specters, shadows, and hungry wolves. In "Diary of a Madman" ("Kuangren riji"), this grotesque estrangement of familiar human beings in the everyday world is extended to Chinese culture as a whole. Not only are the family of the madman, the neighbors, and villagers wolfish and bloodthirsty in the madman's eyes, but even the Chinese classics and Chinese history are inscribed with the words "men eating men." Human beings are but wolves in human skin. This seems to be one message of "Diary of a Madman." But even the madman himself does not go so far as to assert such a nihilistic proposition. In his diary entries, he reflects that the "real man" is different from barbarians and animals and that the cannibalistic men should feel ashamed before

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him. The madman is not as mad as the cannibalistic mass: he not only is aware of his part in the collective cannibalism but also hopes for a better future. It is this trust in the future and in the "real man," however feeble and precariously maintained, that prevents the grotesque in Lu Xun's fiction from lapsing into the meaningless. Characters and events that are distorted in grotesque ways often are objects of a satirical intent and targets of social and cultural critique. The crowd that cheered the execution of the Chinese spy in the slide show could still be awakened by a call. The fallen and beastly nature of his fellow countrymen is but a symptom of the cultural disease that plagues Chinese society and makes the Chinese morally sick and physically deformed. With such wishes and values, the grotesque in Lu Xun tends to become subordinate to social satire and maintains a coherent meaning and message. At the risk of a vague generalization, we may take note of the changing face of the grotesque in Chinese fiction to supply a context for reading Yu Hua's texts. The earliest stories of the marvelous and strange are fascinated with the exotic and the outlandish. In Pu Songling' s Stm11ge Tales from Make-Do Studio, the wildly grotesque and fantastic details and the sequence of events tend to give way to a controlling moral intent that imposes order on disorder and reasserts meaning in absurdities. In Lu Xun grotesque elements often approach the absurd and meaninglessness, but a socially relevant meaning is often recuperated when the grotesque becomes a strategy of irony and satire for cultural criticism. Yu Hua's fiction is devoid of these redeeming units of meaning and moral principles that might illuminate and transcend the nightmarish, ominous landscape of the grotesque world. Whereas the grotesque in Lu Xun' s fiction, under the control of a satirical or ironic intent, never quite prevails over the realistic milieu, Yu Hua's Life Is Smoke (Shislzi ru yan) thrusts us immediately into a nameless realm-a non-place where the mundane and the fantastic, dream and reality, the living and the dead, are no longer distinguishable. Characters in the story seem to live ordinary lives and pursue everyday occupations recognizable as belonging to the contemporary culture, but this seemingly mundane world is bereft of any intelligible order and meaning. The actions and motives of the characters are governed by pure chance, by dreams, and by age-old superstitions, witchcraft, and rituals. The incidents that take place are traced to deeper "causes" even more in need of explanation.

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To give an example of how pure chance works, we may look at how the woman in gray, a typical ominous character in the story, solves the problem of her daughter's childlessness after five years of marriage. Like everyone else in the town, she consults the all-knowing fortuneteller to check if the birthday of her daughter clashes with that of her son-in-law. The fortuneteller answers no and refers her to the bodhisattva who helps deliver babies. The woman goes to the Buddhist temple and pays homage to the bodhisattva by burning incenses. That night in her dream the bodhisattva in her shadowy and gray form descends on the woman, telling her that to solve her riddle she has to ask men in the street. Next morning as soon as the woman goes abroad, she runs into three peddlers carrying fruits. The first has apples, the second bananas, and the third oranges. Believing that only oranges could possibly have seeds (zi), a pun with "child" (zi) in Chinese, the woman talks to the man with oranges: The woman in gray asked, are the oranges for sale? The man: yes. Do they have seeds [zi]?, she asked. No seeds [wu zi, no offspring], the man answered. 37 The narration is laconic, giving the impression of an oracle being pronounced. The woman is taken aback by the answer. It dawns on her why her daughter cannot conceive five years after marriage. It is predestined by Heaven. The woman's riddle is approached first through a consultation with the fortuneteller, then through something of an oracle in her dream, and finally by way of a random punning on the sound of zi, denoting both seeds and child in Chinese. We may take this series of referrals as signs; one sign slides into another until they end up in a pure coincidence of homophones. Yet this coincidence is taken to be the answer. If human fate can be determined by a mere punning on the sound of a word, then life must be no more than a random throw of dice. Indeed, the human characters in Lzfe Is Smoke are far from selfconscious individuals guided by reason and social conventions. No one has a proper name that may indicate personal or social identity. Most of them have only a number as their name, reminiscent of Kafka's use of letters for his characters. Others are designated by such vague labels as "the driver," "the woman in gray," or "the blind man." One persistent motif of grotesque literature in the West is that human bodies are deprived of life and spirit and reduced to mere me-

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chanica! objects. I Iuman bodies arc distorted into puppets, marionettes, and automata, and human faces reduced to masks. This is a theme that runs through E. T. A. Hoffmann's well-known story "The Sandman," perhaps the most frequently discussed work in the criticism of the grotesque and fantastic. To name fictional characters by mere numbers is a bold and ingenious invention by Yu Hua. It is a variation on the Hoffmannesque motif, for what could be more mechanical, impersonal, and ominous than being nothing more than a number? To have one's identity and individuality reduced to digits is a prevalent experience in the post-modern world of technological alienation and has been given extensive literary treatment in grotesque literature in the West. But in Yu Hua's world, this alienating and impersonal force finds a grotesque expression by being embedded in a bizarre tapestry woven of superstitions, rituals, witchcraft, and fortunetelling. It is a world in which human beings are mere dice tossed around by mysterious chance and accident. Not only are human beings estranged into bare numbers, but the world where they live is also transfigured into a ghostly world of dream riddled with mysteries and omens. In Yu Hua's stories, dreams are not a realm apart from the daylight world of everyday life. Characters see visions in their dreams and then order their lives accordingly. Dreams have such enormous authority and significance for these characters that they transform the everyday world into a dream. In his dream, "the driver" runs over "the woman in gray" with his truck. To avoid causing this fearful accident to happen in actuality, he consults the fortuneteller, who tells him to stop the truck every time he sees a woman in gray. Two days later the dreaded dream-accident comes true. While driving on the highway, the driver accidentally runs over a woman who looks identical to the one in his dream. But the woman floats out the side of the truck, unhurt. The driver pays a handsome price for the woman's gray coat, places it on the road, and then drives his truck over it as a substitute for the woman, leaving a tire tread on it. The woman picks up the coat and puts it on, looking as if she has just been run over. She goes home and the next morning is found dead in her bed. Her death and her gray coat with the tire marks on it leave her family wondering how she could possibly have made it home after being run over. This sequence presumably takes place while the characters are wide awake, yet it seems more dreamlike than a "real" dream. "Life is a dream" is an age-old belief and a recurrent literary

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theme, but in Yu Hua's dream landscape this statement, often taken metaphorically, resounds like a literal truth. This is clear in the narrator's attitude. The narrator simply takes it as a matter of fact that the dream is life and life is a dream. He does not step back and detach himself from the world he is describing and pronounce it a dream world. While describing monstrous images, grotesque characters, fantastic events, and incredible happenings, the narrator is deeply immersed in the things described and does not show the slightest bit of surprise, shock, and disbelief-responses that can only stem from an alternative frame of reference. The narrator's impersonal stance contrasts sharply with that of the narrator in Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman." Lu Xun's madman demonstrates a perspicacity and judgment that make him less mad than the cannibalistic men around him. He is able to detach himself from what he sees as a collective conspiracy to eat him up. He studies and interprets the bloodthirsty intentions of his relatives and neighbors in cmmection with Chinese culture as a whole. He makes an evaluative distinction between cannibalistic men and genuine men who have abandoned their beastliness. He condemns his brother more than anyone else for wanting to eat him, implicitly applying a moral standard based on blood kinship. He condemns all cannibalistic men as unworthy of humanity. Finally he looks forward to a better world in which the madness of cannibalism will be eliminated. The madman certainly does not take the cultural madhouse of cannibalism for granted, and the grotesque elements lose their sinister and ominous quality when seen against the hopes for a better world in the future. Yu Hua's world is a madhouse that seems timeless: it lacks theredeeming qualities found in Lu Xun's works. In Yu Hua's story, the world is irrational and life is grotesque as plain matter of fact. In the estranged world where the living and the dead, dream and waking life, beasts and men, are grotesquely fused, there is nothing with which we can orient ourselves. We find ourselves lost in a nameless realm of non-meaning and non-place. We cannot detach ourselves from this world by resorting to a recuperative satirical intention or moral principle. Lost and disoriented, we find our conventional sense of reality subverted and destroyed. The categories applicable to our world are no longer valid. Yu Hua has served up a compelling and unsettling grotesque. It is a literary innovation unique to modern and contemporary Chinese literature.

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The Grotesque Body as a Counter-image Through the grotesque and fantastic, Yu Hua's dream narrative disrupts ordered life and history as envisioned by the discourse of realism. Grotesque images also abound in Can Xue's fiction, and her type of grotesque is a direct affront to the sublime figure. In the official aesthetic discourse, the sublime figure is the driving force of history as the People or the proletariat, or the revolutionary hero, or the monarchic figure and ultimately Mao himself. Looking up at these supreme figures, one is encouraged to forget the fact that they have bodies rooted in biological needs and drives. We are unable to imagine, like the young Fran