The Lyrical in Epic Time

Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis

David Der-wei Wang

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231538572
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Art
• Index: Literature

In this book, David Der-wei Wang uses the lyrical to rethink the dynamics of Chinese modernity. Although the form may seem unusual for representing China's social and political crises in the mid-twentieth century, Wang contends that national cataclysm and mass movements intensified Chinese lyricism in extraordinary ways.

Wang calls attention to the form's vigor and variety at an unlikely juncture in Chinese history and the precarious consequences it brought about: betrayal, self-abjuration, suicide, and silence. Despite their divergent backgrounds and commitments, the writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book all took lyricism as a way to explore selfhood in relation to solidarity, the role of the artist in history, and the potential for poetry to illuminate crisis. They experimented with poetry, fiction, film, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, painting, calligraphy, and music. Western critics, Wang shows, also used lyricism to critique their perilous, epic time. He reads Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Cleanth Brooks, and Paul de Man, among others, to complete his portrait.

The Chinese case only further intensifies the permeable nature of lyrical discourse, forcing us to reengage with the dominant role of revolution and enlightenment in shaping Chinese—and global—modernity. Wang's remarkable survey reestablishes Chinese lyricism's deep roots in its own native traditions, along with Western influences, and realizes the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time.

Part One

Chapter One

“A HISTORY WITH FEELING”

IN DECEMBER 1951, SHEN CONGWEN joined a mission to observe the outcome of Land Reform in Sichuan Province. On the road, Shen wrote a series of letters to his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, and two sons. One dated January 25, 1952, is of particular interest. Shen writes that he was left alone to guard an old house that night; he could not sleep due to the noise of neighbors coughing and quarreling. To pass the time, he turned to an abridged edition of the Shiji 史記 (The record of the historian) that he had found in the trash a few days earlier. As he thumbed through the Liezhuan 列傳 (Biographies) section, he “seemed to enter the ambiance of two thousand years ago: the lived circumstances of the author and the feeling with which he wrote the biographies.”¹ Shen contemplates how loneliness could help one generate new ideas:

When analyzed in terms of its figures’ experiences, one strain of Chinese history—that which pertains to the development of feelings—is inextricable from loneliness. The abstract inclination of Oriental thought cannot be separated from feeling either. Therefore, the discourse of “feeling” (youqing 有情) and the discourse of “actions” (shigong 事功)² are sometimes united into one, but more often than not, they are opposed to each other, forming a state of contradiction. If one harbors “feeling” throughout life, one may end up violating the societal demand of “actions.” … Whereas Guan Zhong 管仲 and Yan Ying 晏嬰 are seen as paragons of “actions,” Qu Yuan and Jia Yi 賈誼 are seen as cases of “feeling.” It follows that “feeling” often implies “incompetence” and, by corollary, “ignorance.”³

Nevertheless, Shen continues, “‘actions’ is something one can always learn and emulate, but ‘feeling’ remains unfathomable.”⁴

For Shen Congwen, Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145?–86 B.C.), the author of The Record of the Historian, is a great historian not only because he chronicles dynastic vicissitudes and heroic deeds with professional rigor but also because he entertains an extraordinary vision of what history is and should be. This enables Sima Qian to probe individual lives at their most compelling while never losing sight of the overarching magnitude of the time and environment with which the individuals interact. Shen contends that this vision “has to do with that which the author has learned from his own life in totality”:

[Sima Qian’s] life was rich and mature. This richness and maturity did not come from his learning any more than from his own experience of pathos and pain. The Nianbiao 年表 (Annals) of the Records of the Historian deals with accomplishments, a section that was completed through archival research. The Biographies, however, required something special of the author’s life. To put it in a less sophisticated way, it could be accomplished only through feeling, feeling that came into existence as a result of the sedimentation of pain. This feeling is a deep perception of life, love of the most profound kind, and knowledge and understanding that go through and beyond actions.⁵

From the key words—“loneliness,” “pain,” “pathos,” and above all, “qing/feeling”—one can imagine how reactionary Shen must have sounded even to the letter’s addressees, his family members. China was celebrating the beginning of a new epoch, but Shen withdrew into ancient times, pondering the meaning of history and feeling. The 1951–52 trip was meant to have him witness the success of the revolution, an accomplishment of shigong indeed, yet it led him to contemplate the poetics of pain and pathos.⁶

Shen makes Sima Qian the implied interlocutor of his letter. As he suggests, through reading select passages of the Records of the Historian, he enters a contact zone where disparate temporalities fold into each other at the incantation of qing. Likewise, Shen gestures toward the possibility that his own sounding could resonate at other moments of history. At stake here is Shen’s radical dialogue with the dominant discourse of the new regime. In contrast with the linear, progressive timeline of revolution, Shen opts for an alternative history, which he sees as a constellation of events, agents, art objects, and sentiments illuminating one another across time and space. Instead of chronicling man-made miracles and disasters, Shen’s history inquires into the intricate turbulences underlying individual lives. Where the socialist telos thrives, Shen calls on the archaeology of qing/feeling.

The most polemical point of Shen’s letter pertains to the representability of history in literary terms. Shen considers Sima Qian a great historian and writer, capable of “depicting a given historical figure in a few hundred words while already showing the spiritual communication between the author and the figure under treatment.”⁷ He finds in Sima Qian’s language the hinge where the represented and representation meet. Insofar as its intelligibility is premised on the succession between past and present, language is to Shen not a transparent vehicle but a palpable sign, a figure, resulting from the sensory data and evocative stimuli of a time. Thus, with the case of the Records of the Historian in mind, Shen concludes that a great history has to be a literary history in the first place, inscribed by language as well as feeling.⁸

Shen Congwen is not unaware of the shortcomings of his vision. When he describes violence and pain as both the motivations of and impediments to a historian like Sima Qian, he is already thinking of the limitations of writing a history with feeling, then and in his own time. As his letter intimates, it will be ironic if the new political regime vows to represent “the insulted and the wounded” yet adopts the conventional “victor’s historiography” it claims to have abolished—proving its legitimacy by subscribing to a discourse reminiscent of the bygone history of “actions.” Shen’s musing brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s notion that all histories are records of the victors overwriting the losers, and therefore amount to a repeated exercise of barbarism.⁹

Benjamin tried to overcome the tiring repetition of the “newness” of history by taking a messianic cum materialist leap into the state of “now.”¹⁰ Shen Congwen does not have such a religious or ideological grounding in his re-vision of history. Instead, he proposes to resort to the mnemonic art of lyrical incantation, a poetic endeavor to construe qing—the quintessence of humanity—by conceptual, figurative, and performative means. In this, he is resonating with the traditional Chinese poetics of remembering and re-membering the past, shishi or poetry as history.¹¹ But Shen is always mindful of the uncertain fate of such a lyrical endeavor; ruination and oblivion are merely the most obvious risks. He even hints that qing manifests itself in history only by default. As described above, the copy of the Records of the Historian he read on the Sichuan trip was only found by chance in the trash. Moreover, that his historical contemplation could b...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: Inventing the “Lyrical Tradition”
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Coda: Toward a Critical Lyricism
• Notes
• Glossary of Chinese Characters
• Bibliography
• Index
• Color Illustrations