Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture

Cannibalizations of the Canon

Carlos Rojas, Eileen Chow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415468800
• eBook ISBN: 9781134032235
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Through analyses of a wide range of Chinese literary and visual texts from the beginning of the twentieth century through the contemporary period, the thirteen essays in this volume challenge the view that canonical and popular culture are self-evident and diametrically opposed categories, and instead argue that the two cultural sensibilities are inextricably bound up with one another.

An international line up of contributors present detailed analyses of literary works and other cultural products that have previously been neglected by scholars, while also examining more familiar authors and works from provocative new angles.The essays include investigations into the cultural industries and contexts that produce the canonical and popular, the position of contemporary popular works at the interstices of nostalgia and amnesia, and also the ways in which cultural texts are inflected with gendered and erotic sensibilities while at the same time also functioning as objects of desire in its own right.

As the only volume of its kind to cover the entire span of the 20th century, and also to consider the interplay of popular and canonical literature in modern China with comparable rigor, Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture is an important resource for students and scholars of Chinese literature and culture.

Part I

Producing popularity

1 Perverse poems and suspicious salons

The Friday School in modern Chinese literature

Michel Hockx

Recent articles and studies have unveiled the variety of literary practices on the cultural scene in the Shanghai of the 1930s.¹ The rediscovery of often forgotten groups and individuals has cast serious doubt on the tenability of existing analytical schemes, which discuss the literary history of this period in terms of a binary opposition between “progressive” and “reactionary” writing, or between the so-called “May Fourth tradition” and its avowed nemesis: popular literature. This essay hopes to show that, although members of the May Fourth generation active as critics in the 1930s continued to express their familiar dissatisfaction with writing they considered in bad taste or unenlightened, there is no reason for scholars nowadays to share these critics’ judgments of taste. In short, this essay tries to turn a well-known argument on its head: rather than assuming that the May Fourth generation represented an actively repressive mainstream of serious writing which “suppressed” popular literature, I argue that, even in the 1930s, this generation was using strategies for gaining symbolic capital within the literary field that are more in line with those typically applied by an avant-garde that considers itself to be suppressed. As a result, it will emerge that the forgotten writers and practices introduced in the main body of this essay did not have much affinity with popular literature at all, but can rather be seen to continue an indigenous moral-aesthetic disposition. These writings and practices were at some time referred to by the term Friday School (Libaiwu pai

).

Friday School was a disparaging label, invented by critics writing for the newspaper supplement Ziyou tan

(Free talk) to refer to writers perceived to be operating on the borderline between the New Literature and the so-called Saturday School (Libailiu pai

). In other words, their writing and behavior were considered dangerously close to a kind of literary activity that lacked seriousness, propagated outdated moral values, and was aimed predominantly at entertainment.

For many decades, the existence of this “school” has been virtually forgotten or ignored in modern Chinese literary studies. The main reason for this has undoubtedly been a political one: the Friday School had an unfortunate run-in with critics associated with the League of Left-Wing Writers, including Lu Xun

(1881–1936). One of the aims of this essay is to show that the quarrel between these two groups had originally nothing to do with politics, but was eventually given a politicized interpretation by members of both camps. The politicized interpretation being the most straightforward one, it survived and is still surviving in general literary histories and reference works. The real reason why critics like Lu Xun, and also Mao Dun

(1896–1981), attacked the Friday School was, I argue, because the styles of the Friday School violated and possibly threatened the legacy of New Culture, in which Lu Xun and Mao Dun had invested so heavily during the previous decade. Their objections to the Friday School at first sight appear to be of a moral, more than of an aesthetic, nature, as their arguments rarely relate to elements of writing, but rather to elements of behavior and personality.

However, I would argue that even this approach relies too much on distinctions created by the writers and critics themselves as part of their agency within the literary field. In order to understand the events more fully, I would like to consider the possibility of interpreting both the moral and political aspects of the debate as part of an ultimately aesthetic distinction, this being a distinction between the New Literature and some of its possible alternatives. In approaching my topic in this manner, I am consciously attempting to circumvent a currently popular line of thinking according to which styles such as those of the Friday School were already “repressed” by the New Literature tradition (in that context usually referred to as the May Fourth tradition) even before the canonization of that tradition in 1949. As the essay will show, the extremely harsh criticism levied at the Friday School by critics in the early 1930s never amounted to any oppression at the time. There is no empirical evidence to suggest that the Friday School was at any time considerably less successful than its opponents—and I use the term “successful” here not only with regard to economic capital, but also with regard to symbolic capital. Moreover, the Friday School was, on occasion, equally capable of silencing New Literature voices. In short, what I intend to provide in this essay is an exercise in literary history which views all practices involved as constituents of modern Chinese literature, without making any a priori assumptions about supposed centers or mainstreams.

It is important to state at the outset that, although I am interested in reviving the individuals and writings categorized under the term Friday School, it is not my intention to reinstate the label itself, or to claim that there was indeed a coherent group of writers operating under this name. The term pai

(“school” or “clique”) is often used in modern Chinese criticism to express a disparaging opinion. The fact that a pai-style label was at some point invented² demonstrates that a strategic effort was undertaken by rivaling critics to polarize against the writers involved. As such, this essay is also a case study in strategic behavior, from a vantage point inspired by the late Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of literary fields.

Below, I first look more closely at various critical strategies common to the literary field under investigation here and relevant to my argument. After that, the bulk of the essay will be devoted to an overview of the practices of the Friday School and its clashes with the May Fourth-generation critics.

Republican-era literary thought and the notion of normative form

One of the reasons why the now canonical authors and critics of New Literature have been described as oppressive lies in the remarkable aggressiveness of their critical writings, particularly with respect to their critiques of more entertainment-oriented popular literature and culture. These critiques are often characterized by a total dismissal of the works or writers in question, and a lack of willingness to debate literary details. This ad hominem style of literary criticism remained common practice throughout the Republican period. This, in itself, is already sufficient to cast doubt on the dominant status of New Literature in its own time, since this style of criticism is not generally characteristic of any literary establishment, but rather of the avant-garde.

In modern European literary history, criticizing the establishment for having squandered its allegiance to purely literary values and therefore focusing one’s critique of the establishment on non-literary issues and couching it in personal or abusive terms, is a recognized strategy in the quest for symbolic capital. As I have argued elsewhere,³ the literary field of twentieth-century China was characterized by the fact that pledging allegiance to the symbolic principle meant to polarize oneself not only against the economic principle (writing for money) but also against the political principle (writing for some collective non-literary purpose).⁴ Some of the earliest examples of attacks by New Literature critics on popula...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: the disease of canonicity
• PART I Producing popularity
• PART II Canonical reflections
• PART III Nostalgia and amnesia
• PART IV Gender and desire