Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature

Ming Dong Gu, Ming Dong Gu

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317236696
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: Asian Literary Criticism

The Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature presents a comprehensive overview of Chinese literature from the 1910s to the present day. Featuring detailed studies of selected masterpieces, it adopts a thematic-comparative approach. By developing an innovative conceptual framework predicated on a new theory of periodization, it thus situates Chinese literature in the context of world literature, and the forces of globalization.

Each section consists of a series of contributions examining the major literary genres, including fiction, poetry, essay drama and film. Offering an exciting account of the century-long process of literary modernization in China, the handbook's themes include:

• Modernization of people and writing
• Realism, rmanticism and mdernist asthetics
• Chinese literature on the stage and screen
• Patriotism, war and revolution
• Feminism, liberalism and socialism
• Literature of reform, reflection and experimentation
• Literature of Taiwan, Hong Kong and new media

This handbook provides an integration of biographical narrative with textual analysis, maintaining a subtle balance between comprehensive overview and in-depth examination. As such, it is an essential reference guide for all students and scholars of Chinese literature.

Part I
Early modern literature (c. 1910s–1942)

Part I: introduction: national salvation and human enlightenment

On October 10, 1911, the new-style army soldiers of the Qing Dynasty in Wuchang, Hubei Province, started a rebellion to overthrow the Manchus government of the last Chinese dynasty. In 1912, the three-year-old last emperor abdicated, and the Republic of China was declared to be established with Dr. Sun Yat-sen as its provisionary president. After the last dynasty was consigned to history, China entered a new historical epoch. But literature lagged behind historical development. For several years, Chinese writers continued to turn out literary works using classical language and time-honored forms and styles, producing traditional themes and motifs, and expressing outmoded aesthetic sensibilities. Then in 1917, the New Youth, a journal founded by Chen Duxiu who was later to become the leader of the CCP, and supported by many scholars who returned from their studies in Europe, America, and Japan, published two articles: “Suggestions for Literary Reform” by Hu Shi and “On Literary Revolution” by Chen Duxiu himself. This totally changed the status quo of Chinese literature. As specimens for the literary revolution, the New Youth first published Hu Shi’s eight poems in vernacular language and free-verse style in 1917, which, however, did not arouse much attention. Then, it published a story by Lu Xun, “A Madman’s Diary.” This vernacular story with an iconoclastic theme and modern sensibilities captured the attention of Chinese intellectuals and students instantly and inaugurated the formal birth of modern Chinese literature.

Following Lu Xun’s lead, other writers created fictional and poetic works with modern themes and aesthetic forms and jointly laid the foundation of modern Chinese literature. The fiction writers include Ye Shaojun, Bing Xin, Yu Dafu, Feng Yuanjun, Lu Yin, Fei Ming, Lin Shuhua, and others. While these fiction writers excelled in stories and novellas, writers who created long and extended narratives were the novelists in whose rank were Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Lao She, Shen Congwen, Li Jieren, and others. Mao Dun’s novel Mid-Night, Ba Jin’s The Family, Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi, Shen Congwen’s Border Town, and Li Jieren’s Stale Water Stirs Ripples marked the full maturity of the modern novel. In the 1930s, there appeared a group of left-wing fiction writers, in whose rank we find Jiang Guangci, Rou Shi, Ye Zi, Zhang Tianyi, Sha Ding, Xiao Hong, and Xiao Jun. Their fictional works are characterized by the Marxist theme of class struggle and revolutionary aesthetics.

Modern Chinese poetry started with Hu Shi’s experiments with free verse. The early poets include Hu Shi, Liu Bannong, Shen Yinmu, Liu Dabai, Zhu Xiang, Xu Zhimo, Feng Zhi, Zhu Ziqing, Wen Yiduo, and last but not least, Guo Moruo, whose poetic masterpiece Goddesses pioneered a free-verse style of poetry which displaced the time-honored traditional poetry in literary language and regulated forms. Younger poets include Bi Zhilin, Li Jinfa, Dai Wangshu, and others. With the exception of Fei Ming’s poems, their poetic works showed visible influence of Western modernism in formal representation and techniques of expression. Dai Wangshu’s “Rainy Lane” is noted for its integration of Western symbolism and traditional Chinese poetic methods. Influenced by Freudianism and the Japanese school of New Sensationalism, a group of writers, Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying, Shi Zhecun, Ye Lingfeng, and others, formed the Chinese school of New Sensationalism.

Modern literary essay appeared early with the literary revolution. In contradistinction to traditional essays, writers like Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Yu Pingbo, Zhu Ziqing, Xu Dishan, and others created a modern essay style, which was enriched by later essayists. In the genre of drama, playwrights like Hong Shen, Tian Han, Ouyang Yuqian, Cao Yu, and others drew inspirations and sources from the Western opera and pioneered modern Chinese drama. When Western opera was first introduced to China, its Chinese form often incurred a mild criticism. But Cao Yu’s two representative plays, Thunderstorm and The Sunrise, drew inspiration and techniques from the Greek drama and Ibsen’s plays and marked the full maturity of modern Chinese opera. As a closely related genre, Chinese cinema arose very early in comparison with other literary forms. The first Chinese film was produced in 1905 and the first feature film A Difficult Couple appeared in 1913. But the early films only served as a new medium for old themes and traditional performing art such as Peking Opera. Chinese cinema in its modern sense of the word did not appear until the early 1920s.

At the founding stage, all the literary genres displayed a distinctive variety of new themes, new characters, new language, and new styles of writing. Infused with the iconoclastic spirit of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, literature of this period was motivated by the implicit and explicit aim to attack the old tradition with Confucianism at its core and to modernize Chinese people, thoughts, society, and ways of life by introducing Western ideas with democracy and science at the center. At the same time, it engaged in modernizing Chinese ways of writing by learning from Western techniques of writing. Of all the themes, the dominant one was that of national salvation through modernizing the people and writings. This major theme continued all the way from the 1920s till 1938, when all Chinese writers and artists joined the national united front against the Japanese invasion. The first part of this handbook will present major writers of all literary genres including film, and their representative works will be examined in depth.

1
Lu Xun’s writings

Modernizing Chinese language and consciousness

Ming Dong Gu

Life and career

Lu Xun (1881–1936), pen name of Zhou Shuren, is widely regarded as father of modern Chinese literature. Born in a declining scholar-official family, Lu Xun received a traditional education in his early life and laid a solid foundation of traditional Chinese scholarship. He even half-heartedly participated in the imperial examination. In his late teen years, he received a modern style education in Nanjing, where he passed a government examination for overseas studies in 1902 and won a government scholarship, which enabled him to study in Japan. Initially, he was studying medicine and planned to be a physician to save the physically sick like his father. But one incident changed his planned career. While studying in the Japanese medical school, he watched a documentary film about the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, fought in northeast China. In the film, a Chinese man alleged to be a Russian spy was captured and about to be beheaded by the Japanese military, while a large crowd of physically healthy Chinese watched the execution nonchalantly. This incident greatly shocked Lu Xun, who was compelled to reconsider his career objective: “Medicine is not that important. For, the citizens of a weak nation, even if they are strong and healthy, will only become meaningless materials for the pillory or on-lookers.” He stopped his pursuit of a medical career and became a writer, hoping to use his writings to enlighten his muddle-headed compatriots and to heal the spiritual sickness of the Chinese nation.

After his return to China in 1909, he was totally disappointed with the social conditions of his motherland before and after the Republican Revolution and indulged himself in pursuing traditional literary activities. In 1915, Chen Duxiu and Li Dachao, two founders of the Chinese Communist Party, initiated the New Culture Movement and called for a literary revolution. Lu Xun pitched himself into the revolution and published in 1918 the first vernacular Chinese story, “A Madman’s Diary,” in New Youth. Through the mouth of a madman, the story denounces the time-honored Chinese civilization as a three-thousand-year history of metaphorical cannibalism under the façade of Confucian morality and virtue. The story became a call to arms for people to join the revolution. It also made him nationally famous overnight and prompted him to the forefront of the New Culture Movement. It was followed by a dozen other stories, which were collected in 1923 into a book Call to Arms (Nahan). These stories were characterized by its thorough-going anti-feudal themes and original artistic style and form, which exerted a profound impact on a generation of young intellectuals and laid the foundation for the maturity and development of modern Chinese fiction. Lu Xun is a multitalented writer and scholar, but in terms of his major literary output, he is mainly a writer of stories, old-style poetry, lyric essays, miscellaneous essays, social criticism and commentaries, as well as a scholar of traditional fiction. In addition to his first story collection, he published two more collections of stories, Wandering (Panghuang) and Old Stories Retold (Gushi xinbian). His new-style lyric essays were collected into two volumes, Wild Grass (Yecao) and Morning Flowers Collected at Dusk (Zhaohua xishi). Of all literary styles, he was the most prolific in writing miscellaneous essays, which has a total number of 16 volumes.

Literary achievements

Lu Xun is perhaps the most creative Chinese writer in the twentieth century, but some critics regret that he did not write a single novel in his life even though he drew a plan for two. He is a recognized master of short stories, yet his stories read more like lyric essays or literary vignettes. Although his fictional works are supposed to be realistic representations, they display clear thematic and stylistic concerns pertaining to symbolism, surrealism, supernatural realism, magical realism, and other experimental writings. In writing style, his writings show an open disregard for generic demarcations as they blend different genres and forms. Contemporaneous with Western modernist writers, he composed literary works which exhibit visible modernist and even postmodern features. For these reasons, I argue that the dominant critical opinion that Lu Xun is a writer of critical realism has overlooked a distinctive dimension of Lu Xun’s literary creativity, which is modernist in nature and exhibits postmodern tendencies, and that his experimental writings should be viewed as contributions to the international Modernist Movement from a non-Western, third-world country. I also suggest that any history of international Modernism would be incomplete if it does not incorporate the incipient modernism pioneered by Lu Xun independent of the modernist influence from the West.¹

Greek mythology attributes sources of creativity to the Muses. Lu Xun’s muse was enigmatic, but far from charming. She takes the form of various demons: social, emotional, moral, and artistic. An adequate understanding of Lu Xun’s muse should be sought from his ambivalent approach to his past, his self-identity, his self-positioning in society, and to his artistic temperament and aspirations formed by his classical training and Western education. First and foremost, Lu Xun wrote his creative works as his efforts for national salvation and cultural revolution. His artistic inspiration is demonic or Dionysian in nature. But like many great writers of the world, he produced his creative writings not only as expressions of political and social ideas but also as ways to work out his personal, emotional, and artistic problems. By temperament, Lu Xun is a lyric poet. For various reasons, social, political, and economic, he chose fiction writing as his literary specialization. In his fictional creation, the poet plays an invisible but decisive role in shaping his literary works. We can describe his lyric talent either as a demon that haunted him all his life or as a muse that guides his literary creation. It is this demon or muse that lay in the deeper stratum of his literary creativity, exerted the most profound impact upon his art, and accounted for the enigmatic discrepancies and colorful varieties of his artistic career.

The masterpieces

“A Madman’s Diary”: modernizing Chinese language

Lu Xun’s fame was inaugurated by his story, “A Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren riji). It consists of an opening in classical language and a diary written by a mad protagonist in vernacular. In the opening, the narrator tells us that the story proper is an account of the madman’s diary. In the diary, he becomes mentally sick and suspects that everyone around him including his brother and doctor attempts to eat him, but he eventually recovers and takes an official position. Thus, through the madman’s mouth, the story conveys an allegorical theme which condemns traditional Chinese history and society: under the disguise of Confucian virtue and morality, Chinese history is a full account of cannibalism, and Chinese society is one inhabited by a cannibalistic people who are both man-eaters and eaten by men. This iconoclastic theme is recognized as having played a crucial role in remolding the national character, thereby contributing to the modernization of Chinese people. Scholars have extensively discussed this theme. In this section, I will examine how Lu Xun’s use of two registers of language reveals the interconnections between consciousness and language, and how linguistic form conveys a subtle message. In dividing the story into the preface in classical language and the diary proper in the vernacular, Lu Xun has pioneered a model of writing that builds on the opposition between the conscious and the unconscious, and the interplay of different registers of language. The preface stands for the conscious aspects of not just the normal mental state of the characters but also for the conscious perception of Chinese culture and society. In contrast, the diary proper represents the perception of the mad man and stands for the true conditions of Chinese culture and society repressed into the unconscious, or covered up by the Confucian ideology. By oppos...