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Ideological Representations of the "New Women" by May Fourth Writers Author(S): Ching-Kiu Stephen Chan Source: Modern Chinese Literature , Spring & Fall, 1988, Vol

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Ideological Representations of the The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the "New Women" by May Fourth Writers Author(s): Ching-kiu Stephen Chan Source: Modern Chinese Literature , Spring & Fall, 1988, Vol. 4, No. 1/2, Gender, Writing, Feminism, China (Spring & Fall, 1988), pp. 19-38 Published by: Foreign Language Publications Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41490626 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Foreign Language Publications is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Modern Chinese Literature This content downloaded from 132.174.250.222 on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 16:04:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Modem Chinese Literature (Vol. 4, 1988) The Language of Despair: Ideological Representations of the "New Women" by May Fourth Writers Ching-kiu Stephen Chan The deepest longing of human existence is ... the longing of man for selfhood, the longing to transform the narrow peak of existence into a wide plain with the path of life winding across it . But every longing fulfilled is a longing destroyed. Georg Lukács Soul and Form, 1910 It took her five weeks to learn that my work could not be restricted by regular eating hours. ... My appetite was much smaller than before, now that I was sitting at home all day using my brain, but even so there wasn't always even enough rice. It had been given to [the dog] A Sui hens to eat my left-overs. It was a long time before I realized this. I was very conscious, however, that my "place in the university," as Huxley describes it, was only somewhere between the dog and the hens. LuXun "Regret for the Past," 1925 In the turbulent times of the May Fourth cultural movement in modern China, the search for a new subjectivity was carried out quite frequently in terms of capturing, in a new form, the identity crisis of the "new women" [j tin nüxing ]. Yet the control of this form was everywhere disciplined by the intellectual (male-centered) self, whose own dilemma of identity tended to be posited in relation to the alien, repressed, but emerg- ing "other" of the woman in question. Such attempts to give "form" to women's identity during the early stages of China's modernization were common not only in the works of female writers like Ding Ling, but more so (though perhaps less ostensibly) in the works of leading male writers like Lu Xun and Yu Dafu. Mao Dun's early fiction seemed to occupy an ambiguous position somewhere in between, as most of his female protagonists were left, characteristically, between suffering a complete collapse of consciousness in an outpouring of emotions and resigning to the total silence of solitude and despair. However, for Mao Dun, as for Lu Xun and Yu Dafu, the woman's sense of solitude and despair, her gesture of resistance and revolution, indeed the totality of her consciousness - all these could find a channel of 19 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.222 on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 16:04:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Chan: Language of Despair expression only through a voice that spoke in the grammar of the dominant discourse of crisis, be it the voice of a solitary outcast (in Yu Dafu), the voice of a half-inert, half-sympathetic bystander (in Lu Xun), or the voice of a cool, calm and ultimate revolutionary (in Mao Dun). The result was a mimetic movement toward the (other) self, toward some possible forma- tions of female subjectivity that contributed to the aesthetic dimension of modern Chinese representation nothing less than a labyrinth of discursive modes. My objective in this study is to address the basic question of repre- sentation - perhaps the one common message of all realist aesthetics - by focusing on the new images of women as they emerged in specific cultural and historical "formations of despair" during the period immediately fol- lowing the May Fourth Movement of 1919. As I attempt to re-organize the classical mimetic function of realism around the enunciative performance of language in the Chinese realist discourse, I argue that the modern intellectual wanted desperately to re-present /iwnself via a mutation in the crisis of the "other." At the same time, I am also suggesting that the aesthetic question is definitely a matter of form, but not (in the last analysis) of form alone. Hence, my reading of some of the earliest realist writings in modern China can also be taken as an effort to reconstruct the basic quest for form through what might be called an aesthetics of despair. By ap- proaching the crisis of consciousness from the vantage point of repre- sentation - the representation of the "other" by the self, of "reality" by language - I wish to show how the realist obsession with despair is itself an attempt at mediating the contradictions of form. The critical problem I want to lay out is this: Given the complex of conflictual social relations involved in the intellectual's will to implement revolution through various new ways of subjective expression (such as love), how was it possible for the realist form (itself the embodiment of a radical discourse) to capture the totality of that crisis - that despair - without handling the problematic of its own crisis - the crisis of representation? * Actively participating in the so-called New Literary Movement, progressive May Fourth writers like Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun all tried to bring home to their contemporary readers a critical sense of unrest and bewilderment they felt as part of their historical experiences, not because they could logically show the public the authentic meaning of history, but because they had compelled them to either accept, reject, or compromise the ways in which their common condition of existence was being represented through the text. And as the social and ideological texture of reality thus exposed to the readers was received at once with pity and with fear, the crisis of consciousness it summoned up for them would 20 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.222 on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 16:04:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Modem Chinese Literature (Vol. 4, 1988) turn out to be contained, ultimately, in a discourse of solitude and despair that spoke to the crisis of feminine subjectivity as the "other" question of representation for the dominant intellectual "self." For everyday events were lived by men and women as history mostly via detours. Often, historical moments were "summoned up" for the col- lective consciousness without recourse to the normalizing mediation of everyday exercise of power relations. Thus, "history" for the Chinese populace was experienced as collective life when, during the May Fourth era, the dominant culture of the people was being recognized for the first time, by intellectuals and other significant social groups in the urban community, as the actual order of a repressive systematics, namely, the patriarchal hegemony. Reality was now being negatively identified, not as any natural, monologic voice of history, but as the undeniable inauthen- ticity of an aging patriarch best manifested then in the icon of Confucius himself. What evolved through this collective crisis were not merely the so-called "dark sides" of reality, but the actual formations of what Herbert Marcuse calls in Reason and Revolution a "negative totality." It designates, for Marcuse, the overall (visible and invisible) conditions that help expose the entire structure of reality, the total network of sociohistorical con- tradictions in which "every particular moment [of crisis] contains, as its very content, the whole, and must be interpreted as the whole" (159). In the light of this problematic, it may be possible to propose that, for the May Fourth intellectuals (among them iconoclastic writers of all sorts), to capture the historical moments of their time was, in essence, to summon up those experiences of crisis for a new mode of representation, and (thus) as the question of representation itself. As the Confucian icon crumbled in the turbulent New Cultural Move- ment motivated by enthusiastic intellectuals of the May Fourth generation, word about a new future for women began to spread. Ibsen's Nora became an instant symbol of rebellion and the immediate spokeswoman, as it were, for an alternative hegemony whose foreseeable future remained unknown, uncertain, and unreal. But all the obstacles notwithstanding, one could still witness the emergence of a critical consciousness that addressed women as repressed and marginal under traditional social relationships. Since such a phenomenon was most unusual in a culture dominated for thousands of years by a hyper-static ethical and political order, the subversive act itself might legitimately be considered the collective response to a major histori- cal crisis. The prominent result was, at the pivotal point of May Fourth, a crisis of consciousness among the new intellectuals, for whom all the passionate urges for change came together in the formation of a normally 21 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.222 on Sun, 18 Jul 2021 16:04:11 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Chan: Language of Despair unethical discourse, one that was written, spoken, and read in the name of Eros, its lack, its excess, and its reason for being, for despair.1 Once repressed, the language of despair- despair as the root of existence, despair as the cause for life - now erupted through layers of institutional and ideological dominance to appear in the formation of a new ethic and a new culture.
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