The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis 9780231538572

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The Lyrical in Epic Time

Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis

David Der-wei Wang

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NewYork

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Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the publication of this book. Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wang, Dewei, author. The lyrical in epic time : modern Chinese intellectuals and artists through the 1949 crisis / David Der-wei Wang. pages em Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-17046-8 (cloth : acid-free paper)- ISBN 978-0-231-53857-2 (electronic) 1. Chinese literature-20th century-History and criticism. 2. Literature and society- China. 3. Music-China-20th century-History and criticism. 4. Painting, Chinese-20th centuryHistory and criticism. 5. Calligraphy, Chinese- History- 20th century. 6. Motion picturesChina-History-20th century. 7. Modernism (Literature)-China. 8. China-Intellectual life-20th century. I. Title. PL2303.W275 2015 895.109'0052-dc23 2014008487

8 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 COVER IM AGE :

Luhua feiyan jjJDThlli (Reeds and geese, 1980s). Courtesy of Ms. Feng Yeh

COV ER DESIGN:

Milenda Nan OkLee

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Prologue Introduction: Inventing the "Lyrical Tradition"

vii ix 1

PART ONE Chapter One

"A History with Feeling"

41

Chapter Two

The Three Epiphanies of Shen Congwen

79

Chapter Three

Of Dream and Snake: He Qifang, Feng Zhi, and Born-Again Lyricism

113

Chapter Four

A Lyricism of Betrayal: The Enigma of Hu Lancheng

155

vi

C 0 NT EN T S

PART TWO Chapter Five

The Lyrical in Epic Time: The Music and Poetry of]iang Wenye

193

Chapter Six

The Riddle of the Sphinx: Lin Fengmian and the Polemics of Realism in Modern Chinese Painting

237

Chapter Seven

A Spring That Brought Eternal Regret: Fei Mu, Mei Lanfang, and the Poetics of Screening China

271

Chapter Eight

And History Took a Calligraphic Turn: Tai]ingnong and the Art of Writing

311

Coda: Toward a Critical Lyricism

353

Notes Glossary of Chinese Characters Bibliography Index

371 453 459 487

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

to my colleagues in the Chinese, Sinophone, and Sinological worlds, particularly Professors Zong-qi Cai, Yu-yu Cheng, Sukhueng Cheung, Susan Daruvala, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Olga Lomova, and Zhang Songjian, for their thoughts and comments throughout the process of writing this book. Above all, I am deeply indebted to Professors Kowk-kau Leonard Chan and Ko Ch'ing-ming, whose insights and encouragement have been an invaluable source of inspiration. I would also like to thank Professors Chen Pingyuan, Li Nan, Huang Ying-che, Ko Chia-cian, Tang Yonghua, William Tay, Wang Wenjuan, Xia Xiaohong, and Xu Qingping; and Dr. Liao Chao-heng, Madame Barbara Ming-yi Fei, Madame Liao }ingwen, Ms. Feng Yeh, Mr. Shen Longzhu, and Mr. Kamloon Woo for their research assistance and advice on earlier drafts of the book. Professor C. T. Hsia (1921-2013) passed away as I was completing this book. I have the deepest respect for his erudition and for his and Mrs. Della Hsia's guidance and friendship all these years. I cherish the many good times we shared during my tenure at Columbia University. My colleagues at Harvard-Wai-yee Li, Jie Li, Stephen Owen, Karen Thornber, Xiaofei Tian, and Eugene Wang-have always illuminated me with their thoughts and works. I could not have finished the book without the benefit of their scholarship and dialogue. Specials thanks go to Professors Michael Berry, Andrew Rodekohr, Carlos Rojas, and Chien-hsin Tsai for reading the manuscript and offering 1 AM MOST GRATEFUL

~H

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

critical suggestions, and to all my students, particularly Jingling Chen, Tarryn Chun, Casey Lee, Kyle Shernuk, Dylan Suher, and Ying Lei, involved in the project over the past years. Ms. Jennifer Crewe of Columbia University Press has been extremely conscientious and insightful in helping me prepare the book. I thank her and her colleagues, Leslie Kriesel, Jonathan Fiedler, and Kathryn Schell, for their editorial expertise and professionalism. I thank National Taiwan University Press for publishing parts of chapters 4, 5, and 8 in Chinese and for granting the rights to reproduce the illustrations. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Richard Kunst, Ms. Bibby Moore, Mr. Jesus Arias, Ms. Hilda Chagua, and my family members, Jennifer, Mike, Vivian, and Jonathan, for their support during a long and challenging period of writing. This book is dedicated to my mentor, Professor Arthur E. Kunst (1934-2013).

PROLOGUE

one of the least likely terms to be associated with China in the mid-twentieth century. This period witnessed a succession of crises: the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Civil War, the national split in 1949 and the resulting exodus of millions of Chinese, and the campaigns in New China, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. The magnitude of the tumult was such that to focus on the lyrical in this period has been dismissed as anachronistic and self-indulgent. However, I contend that precisely because the mid-twentieth century in China was characterized by national cataclysms and mass movements, all of which brought drastic changes to Chinese lives, this period helps bring into view the extraordinary work of Chinese lyricism at its most intense. Lyricism in Chinese literary culture has always implicated an interaction between the self and the world, and during this period there emerged waves of literary and artistic practices that sought to identify individual options in the face of the atrocities. Lyricism can be seen as a poetics of selfhood that informs the historical moment and helps define Chinese modernity in a different light. The writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book could hardly be called a unified group: they were liberals, leftists, conservatives, revolutionaries, collaborators, ideological converts, and self-styled individualists. They expressed themselves in recourse to a variety of media forms such as poetry, fiction, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, "THE LY R 1CAL" IS PERHAPS

x

PROLOGUE

cinema, theater, painting, calligraphy, and above all, music. For all their divergent backgrounds and commitments, they each invoked the "lyrical" as they came to ruminate on the stakes of selfhood vis-a-vis solidarity, pondering historical contingencies and poetic/artistic assertions and experimenting with forms that they believed best cast light on and responded to the time of crisis. More significantly, the invocation of the lyrical did not happen merely in mid-twentieth-century China. Contemporary Western critics with different theoretical and ideological beliefs, ranging from Martin Heidegger to Theodor Adorno and from Cleanth Brooks to Paul de Man, all took up lyricism as a way to critique the perilous, epic time. The lyrical was treated alternately as a modernist malaise, a socialist virtue, a bourgeois sentiment, a metaphysical trope, and a revolutionary imaginary. The Chinese cases further intensify the permeable nature of this discourse. Why did these literary and cultural figures feel impelled to address lyricism at a time when action at an epic scale seemed more urgently in order? What constituted the lyrical discourse of the time? More pertinently, what is the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time? These are the questions that this book intends to explore. Accordingly, the title, The Lyrical in Epic Time, takes me beyond the more predictable "the lyrical in an epic time" to describe the overarching implications of the figures under discussion: their provocations and articulatory "tonalities," their experimentations in reaction to historical tempos. Here "the lyrical" and "the epic" are inspired by the way Jaroslav Prusek (1906-1980) used them,1 pointing to not only a genre or style that informed a literary culture2 but also a set of values or a "structure of feeling" that registered a social episteme. 3 Through a constellation of figures, genres, and approaches, I seek to map out the multiple strains oflyrical representation during this period, and contemplate their significances with regard to contemporary China. These chapters share two thematic interventions. First, the lyrical discourse helps me rethink the sufficiency of the extant paradigm of Chinese modernity, which is largely dominated by the double claims of revolution and enlightenment. I seek to triangulate the paradigm by arguing that revolution can be powered by both political action and poetic provocation, and that enlightenment can have an impact only when charged with creative sensibilities. Such a lyrical discourse, however, also carries the perfidious symptoms of its time. These include a cluster of tensions rarely touched on in traditional poetics: betrayal and brutality are seen as exchangeable with expressive sincerity, ideological fanaticism evokes

P R0 L0 G U E

an unlikely resonance with idyllic yearning. Above all, lyricism begets its own disavowal, in terms of self-abjuration, suicide, and silence. Second, I call attention to the fact that, Western inspirations aside, this lyrical discourse drew sources no less from its own heritage. For one thing, the lyrical, or shuqing ff·~]!t in Chinese, has entertained both spontaneous and figurative, both personal and political dimensions traceable to ancient China. The way shuqing evolved to become lyrical in modern times already suggests the tortuous routes of transculturation. I devote much discussion in each chapter to the modern interpretations of classical Chinese poetics, to trace the links that have long been obscured by more frequent references to figures from Schiller to Rilke, from Wordsworth to Auden, or from Pushkin to Mayakovsky. To that effect, I use both "shuqing" and "lyrical" so as to highlight the etymological and conceptual complexity of my discussion. In view of the highly contested motivations and practices inherent in lyricism during this period, I am aware that I may have raised more questions than I can answer in one book. As a matter of fact, critical voices have already been heard from China and elsewhere. To the critics who worry that I am "depoliticizing" the Chinese revolutionary heart, I suggest that the depoliticized status quo results more from the entropy of the originary, lyrical momentum of revolution: Didn't Marx suggest that revolution cannot take its poetry from the past but only from t he future? 4 To critics who worry that I am deviating from the great "lyrical tradition," I propose that we understand tradition not as a great chain of being but as a succession of inventions, anti-inventions, and reinventions. Above all, I am not promoting lyricism/shuqing as a new magic formula for modern Chinese literary and intellectual studies. Instead, I treat it as a critical interface through which more soundings about Chinese (post)modernity can be heard in reverberation.

I would like to reflect more on the extant paradigm of modern Chinese literary and cultural studies. First, as suggested above, the master narrative of Chinese literary and cultural history of the past century has been dominated by "revolution" and "enlightenment."5This paradigm is charged with a strong sense of historical relevance and political urgency; its impact is evinced by an array of scholarship on subjects from t he Literary Revolution to the Cultural Revolution, and then to the postsocialist revolution. But if revolution and enlightenment presuppose the agency of a modern subjectivity, the TO FURTH ER MY OBSERVAT ION ,

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P R0 L 0 G U E

question of how such a subjectivity demonstrates its capacity to feel, and be felt about, with regard to either political action or epistemological pursuits should not be overlooked. To be sure, modern Chinese literature and artworks of the past century are not short of representations of interior aspirations and turbulences. From ideological fanaticism to sentimental outpouring, from decadent self-abandon to cynical escapade, they are saturated with a wide variety of feelings and expressions. But we have yet to see a discourse about how subjectivity expresses, acquires, and critiques feelings and emotions as nuanced as that ascribed to the studies of either revolution or enlightenment. That literary scholars and critics are shying away from the polemics of feeling/qing t~ may reflect a predilection toward what Yli-sheng Lin calls the "cultural-intellectualistic approach," which favors a holistic understanding and solution of Chinese crisis merely at the level of intellectual deliberation. 6 Above all, it betrays a conformism to the prevalent "strong" thought of modernity. 7 This "strong" mode of thinking originated in the late Qing and May Fourth era and reached its apex during the Maoist regime, as illustrated by the mandate of nation building and the demands of volition, reason, collectivity, virility, and revolution. Rhetorically, it manifested in macroscopic (hongguan 'i:IR.) imagery, the "sublime figure," 8 and the "epic" representational system such as daguo ::kWI (great nation) and tianxia :Ar (under heaven). By contrast, the lyrical comes across simply as too weak and trivial to carry the weight of modernity's demands.9 But the accomplishments of Chinese writers and artists are not necessarily subject to such a critical assumption. For instance, Lu Xun's %-ill "call to arms" or "wandering" does not bring out merely his revolutionary fervor; it touches readers' hearts also because it unveils the master's disturbed psyche resonating with works from the Chuci j!if (Songs of the south) to Leonid Andryev's fiction. Whereas Zhou Zuoren %l1'FA (1885-1967) comes to terms with his treason by recourse to Japanese aesthetics and Chinese hermetism, Qu Qiubai mt\F! (1899- 1935) acts out his martyrdom by recapitulating not only revolutionary altruism but also the Buddhist notion of self-annihilation.10 Even Mao Zedong .=£j'* derives his charisma as much from his revolutionary feats as from his poetic provocations.U His lyrical bent brought him to express in classicalstyle Chinese song lyrics and poems his remembrances of personal loss, his musings on historical vicissitudes, and his ecstasy when likening all citizens under his rule to the ancient sage kings Shun and Yao immersed in the spring breeze.12

PR0 L0 GUE

A truly "strong" mode of thinking is by logic resilient enough to embrace rather than reject the multiple expressions of humanity. At the core of a revolutionary action often resides a most tender yearning for a "singular plural" utopia. 13 The renowned contemporary Chinese thinker Li Zehou ?fit¥)~ (b. 1929) pointed out in the 1980s that Chinese modernity is motivated by two causes, "enlightenment" (qimeng {l"f'ii) and "national salvation" (jiuwang :Jt)l:t::).14 Li's observation has been regarded as most influential in reshaping the post-Mao discourse. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that Li at the same time urged the new generation of Chinese to resuscitate their ganxing !®'i"t, or affective and aesthetic sensibilities, as a complement to and critique of the causes and consequences of enlightenment and revolution.15 At the turn of the new century, Li even proposed that the "original substance of feeling" or qingbenti 't~;f:fl)l be the impetus for China's continued search for postsocialist subjectivity.16 Li's "emotive turn" may appear to be a retreat from the front line of the socialist project. But for someone whose ideology is grounded in Marxism and whose reputation arose from the "Great Debate Over Aesthetics" with the Crocean aesthetician Zhu Guangqian *7tM (1897-1986) and dogmatic Marxist aesthetician Cai Yi g;¥fit (1906-1992) in the late fifties, 17 Li has come a long way to where he now stands.18 Li proclaims that, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, one must rethink the insufficiencies of"revolution" and "enlightenment," and that without reflecting on and cultivating qing/9 Chinese subjectivity cannot be fashioned anew. Li's theoretical eclecticism-including at least Marxian humanism, Kantian aesthetics, and Confucianism-has incited debates. 20 He nevertheless found an unlikely echo when the Chinese government made "harmonious society" (hexie shehui i'W ~i!i~Ht) its goal in 2005 and when President Xi]inping called for a "Chinese dream" (zhongguo meng tp ~ §!t) in 2013, as if even the socialist machine were trying to reconstitute its power through a lyrical evocation of (Confucian/socialist) harmony and dream. 21 My second point pertains to the extant model of critiquing interiority versus exteriority in modern Chinese literature and culture. More than half a century ago, C. T. Hsia described Chinese literature as marked by an "obsession with China." Hsia holds that modern Chinese literati are so obsessed by national crises as to turn their repugnance for the status quo into a masochistic exercise; that is, they want to "possess" any given social and political malaise as something unique to China, thus grappling wit h Chinese modernity negatively by denouncing itY Hsia's critique has been supplemented by critics from different angles. Rey Chow takes note of the "primitive passions" in Chinese textual and visual culture, by which

xiii

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PR0 L0 GU E

she means that Chinese writers and filmmakers tend to invoke the human and natural imagery of the raw and underprivileged, thereby flaunting the deprived conditions of China's encounter with the modern. 23 Jing Tsu simply names the complex of "failure" a paradoxical symptom of modern Chinese identity politics. 24 In contrast, whereas Marston Anderson and Eugenia Lean discuss "sympathy" in personal and popular domains respectively, 25 Haiyan Lee calls attention to the causes and effects of the "revolution of the heart," 26 and Gloria Davies discovers among contemporary Chinese intellectuals, neoleftists, and neoliberals alike the syndrome of "worrying about China." 27 More noticeable is Ban Wang's study of the "sublime figure" as "a discursive dynamic, a psychic mechanism, a stunning figure, a grand image of the body, or a crushing and uplifting experience from the lowest depression to the highest picture. By these processes and images, whatever smacks too much of the human creature-appetite, feeling, sensibility, sensuality, imagination, fear, passion, lust, self-interest, etc.- is purged and repressed so that the all-toohuman is sublimated into the superhuman and even inhuman realms." 28 These analyses, observant and provocative as they are, derive their theoretical premises primarily from Western discourses on subjectivity, psychoanalysis, and affect. One can argue that, insofar as the discipline of "modern Chinese literature" came into existence as a mixture of foreign and indigenous sources, there is no need to solicit Chinese essentialism at the theoretical level. Still, it is impossible to overlook the uneven development of discursive agency, with Western theory taking precedence over Chinese subjects (and subjectivities), in academia. When speaking of the dynamics of the modern Chinese mindscape, it has become customary to refer to the theories developed by critics from Agamben to Zizek, chief among whom are Freud and Foucault. But how often have propositions such as Lu Xun's "Power of the Mara Poet" (Moluo shili fff.lfi;!j}J), Zhang Taiyan's 'i:i)\Jt (1869-1936) "grand individuality" (dadu A:~) and "subjectivity under erasure" (wuwo zhiwo ;Q(I;JJi::ZJl(;), 29 Zhu Guangqian's "serenity" (jingmu ~fii), 30 and Hu Feng's MJ!ii.L (1902-1985) "subjective fighting spirit" (zhuguan de zhandou jingshen j_J~IliY'.JIIlx r~fJHI[r) been brought up to facilitate a diacritical investigation? Whereas Benjaminian "flaneurs" are said to have roamed the Chinese land, Hu Lancheng's m~!JX (1906-1981) "vagabond" (dangzi YiJ), 31 however relevant to the Chinese circumstances, has gone into eclipse. Foucauldean "archaeology" has been widely welcomed over the past decades, but Shen Congwen's iJc:ft )( (1902- 1988) "lyrical archaeology" (shuqing kaoguxue JH?f :oliftl~) remains obscure to most literature majorsY

PRO LOG UE

Contrary to the common wisdom that the May Fourth era was aperiod of total antitraditionalism, intellectuals and literati at the time appear to have been radical comparatists when analyzing modern foreign importations as well as traditional Chinese legacies. For example, his indebtedness to Nietzsche and Stirner aside, Lu Xun expresses his modernist angst by revisiting the abysmal pathos of both Qu Yuan JW}jj'[ (340-278 B.c.) and Tao Qian ~fl% ~~. '1;~7UVltl'ro

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