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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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

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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

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 formations 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 representation - 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 following 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 representation - 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

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 collective 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 contradictions 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 historical 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

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. It gave rise to an alternative discourse that might have contributed to women's new entry into history. Yet despite its revolutionary momentum, the eruption, in effect, also became the very sign of continual disruption. For given the all-pervasive constraints of the traditional hegemony, insertion into an order of legitimacy need not necessarily allow the "new woman" to represent her own identity in, much less to liberate herself from, the presiding Law of the symbolic Father, whose ultimate logos was once embodied, for the Chinese, in the figure of the Dragon. Indeed, it is my belief that even such radical iconoclasts as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun must have lived their lives struggling amid the contradictions between the deep sense of alienation they felt before the symbolic Dragon that guarded the entrance to every existing institution and a corresponding sense of alterity - the irresolvable complex of will, passion and frustration experienced in their attempts to overcome that alienation, to dismantle that institution, and to rationalize that very despair. Lu Xun, for one, provides us with a perfect case in which contradictions were multiplied, rather than simply resolved, in the text. As the leading writer of his time, Lu Xun's strong concern for the status of Chinese women was in line with his ruthless criticism of the repressive practices of traditionalism as a whole. Yet despite his persistent commitment to help cure the disease of the Chinese mind, Lu Xun could never separate the ethical drive and historical mission to implement social changes from his own private dilemma of consciousness. Such a dilemma was caused by the inner dialectic of faith and anxiety that constituted the identity crisis for the majority of the May Fourth intellectuals. It was this crisis of split consciousness, of phantom reality, that caught the Chinese writer - as a socially committed individual - between the will to hope before a dawning future of revolution and the recourse to despair as the only remaining powerhouse in the twilight of history. This being understood, it would be easier to comprehend the fact that, after such prominent works as "Zhufu" [The new year's sacrifice] had possibly set the norms for a realist fiction in modern China, Lu Xun should choose to end, more or less, his career as a writer of fiction by publishing a unique volume of prose poems, Yecao [The wild grass], in which moments of intensified despair were highlighted. In another development, the subjective condition of despair had been so desperate for Yu Dafu from the very beginning that it would readily

1 See my discussion in "Eros as Revolution: The Libidinal Dimension of Despair in Mao Dun's Rainbow," Journal of Oriental Studies 24.1 (1986): 37-53.

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) subsume any potential energy left for actual explorations into more manifestly social dilemmas. Hence Yu's formulation of an autobiographical mode that magnified what was equal to Lu Xun's split consciousness in an idiosyncratic fashion. In a significant way, the works of both writers, whether realist or otherwise, had paved the way for a discourse that appeared, on one level, to have disrupted the dominant discourse on women, only to end up, on another level, undermining the initial attempts of subversion as a result of an unforeseen problem, that of representation. It is little but hindsight for us to suggest today that the misguided practice of the May Fourth iconoclasts was partly rooted in their failure to posit a concrete historical as well as textual place for the new women of China. But for the intellectual iconoclasts writing at that particular juncture in history, where contradictions were lived as part of everyday reality, the paradox of representation was a fundamental and critical one. Their choice was most difficult to make - between representing the symbolic liberation of women and disrupting the dominant mode of discourse that had initiated the very act of subversion in the first place. As a writer and a social witness of the new women's history, one's stand was feeble indeed - his place (as Lu Xun would have suggested), possibly somewhere between a few scrawny hens and an old, lonesome dog. The fragility became even more threatening when the position to take was one on the emotional reality of women. Caught at the margin where rationality met irrationality, women's role was habitually normalized and contained within the male-centered network of domestication and accom- modation. What concerns me in the following analysis is the textual or- ganization of the (male) intellectual "self' in relation to the (female) emotional "other" - that act of representation that may now be recognized as an objectifying process of the identity crisis rooted in the collective unconscious of the May Fourth writers. Taken as the first step toward any reassurance of selfhood, objectification is a central function in the dialectic of form and consciousness. To objectify is to divest oneself of, to part with, one's self, one's consciousness. The alienated form subsequently evolves as the alterity of consciousness, whereas the wholeness of self is maintained on the basis that it has successfully expelled that which is less coherent and "other" than self. Thus, any possible transcendence of self is to be achieved in its very negativity. In other words, mediation through objectification consists in the process of containing the uncertain (the oneself: herself) in the certain (the one's self: his self). To analyze the functioning of the objectifying mode in the representation of self as other, we shall now look more closely at a few examples taken from works by the three major writers mentioned earlier.

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In Lu Xun's "Shangshi" [Regret for the past], Juansheng is the first- person narrator who, in a series of notes, attempts to look back into and redeem the essence of his life during a period shortly after the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement, when he has just turned from a follower of "new thoughts" into a poor writer trying to sell manuscripts in support of a family of two. Juansheng begins his notes with these words: "I want, if I can, to describe my remorse and grief for Zijun's sake as well as for my own" ("Shangshi" 1 10; "Regret" 197). The past, it seems obvious, is here remembered as much to represent his loss of a sense of honor and dignity in life as it is to regret, to re-articulate, that loss as the loss of his wife Zijun. Disillusioned by the mundane life they shared after an initial moment of glory at the outbreak of the May Fourth cultural revolution, Zijun even- tually left their home and soon died without her husband knowing. Her "disappearance" is typically represented in the story as Juansheng's loss of someone whom he had first inspired with revolutionary zeal (before their marriage) and from whom he had subsequently alienated himself (after their marriage). As the more stirring moments of the revolution had passed, it became more and more his belief that while he was plunging hard into life, exhausting his brainwork in the desperate hope of filling their stomachs, the woman he loved had simply begun to drift further and further away from a "meaningful" course of life. To his great disappointment, Zijun's life was now being preoccupied with none other than dogs, hens, and other domestic trivialities. Hence, right before he was to realize his then much-relocated "place in the universe," Juansheng tried to rebuild the integrity of his self and re-articulate the dignity within his ego by drawing upon the agony of which she, his wife, was apparently the cause:

Then there was the never-ending business of eating every day. All Zijun's effort seemed to be devoted to our meals. One ate to earn, and earned to eat; while A Sui and the hens had to be fed too. Apparently she had forgotten all she had ever learned, and did not realize that she was interrupting my train of thought when she called me to meals. And although as I sat down I sometimes showed a little displeasure, she paid no attention at all, but just went on munching away quite unconcerned. ("Shangshi" 119; "Regret" 205)

Now Lu Xun never explicitly tells us what Zijun was supposed to have learned, and which, according to Juansheng, she had then completely forgotten. And it need not be argued that Juansheng might actually be justified in his recognition of the change Zijun had undergone. The point, though, is to see the ideological function of the text revealed in the representation of that change.

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In the early stage of their relationship, Juansheng and Zijun, like thousands of other young Chinese of their time, had much to share with respect to the new and exciting changes they recognized and anticipated in their society. In their sharing of the experience of a new culture, as Juansheng later remembers it, "the shabby room would be filled with the sound of my voice as I held forth on the tyranny of the family, the need to break with tradition, the equality of men and women, Ibsen, Tagore and Shelley . . . She would nod her head, smiling, her eyes filled with a childlike look of wonder" ("Shangshi" 111; "Regret" 198). We know little about what Zijun actually thought of all those "new ideas," for we are allowed to know her only as Juansheng remembers her. And apparently her opinions could not be all that different from his own, because, as her mentor, he "was able to read her soberly like a book, body and soul" ("Shangshi" 114; "Regret" 198). Body and soul, she was there to be read and recorded in justification of one's own assertion of self-integrity, one's own transcendence of a painful crisis of identity. And this time, for Zijun, after she had broken away from the confines of her traditional family, the one man in her life turned out to be Juansheng, her husband, mentor and intellectual self. Her voice is represented directly in Juansheng's discourse only once, six months after they started discussing the "new ideas," when she is quoted to have made the most memorable statement to her husband: "I'm my own self; none of them has any right to interfere with me" ("Shangshi" 112; "Regret" 198). For Juansheng, here lies the gist of his regret - that this absolute moment in Zijun's life is never to be captured again. For Zijun, one suspects, this would be the discourse of a Chinese Nora openly betrayed by her share of the revolution. Moreover, this loss of the past is also represented as her loss of the will and passion to live the present. Even despair has been rejected as a source of identity; For Zijun, even the despair of self has to be relocated in the despair of the other. The objectification of its memory in Juansheng's journal may thereby be taken to be the key-hole, the central mediation, through which the other (masculine) self visualizes his will and objectifies his passion; bypassing the despair of Zijun, Juansheng has found his ways to transcend the past, re-live the present, and peep into the future. By the end, it is more for the loss of his selfhood than for hers that Juansheng regrets, through remembering, the passing of time:

But where could I go? I realized, naturally, there were many ways open to me, and sometimes seemed to see them stretching before . . . Here is the same shabby room as before, the same wooden bed, half dead locust tree and wisteria. But what gave me ¡ove and life, hope and happiness before has vanished. There is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence I exchanged for truth. ("Shangshi" 129; "Regret" 214)

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Alternatively, the woman is nothing but emptiness, the empty existence the man is allowed to objectify and exchange for "truth." The emphasis in the citation is added here to accentuate the ideology of a certain split consciousness that Juansheng reveals for his readers throughout his notes, a crisis one can recognize no less at the beginning than at the very end as the undeniable sign of his own anxiety: "I must make a fresh start in life. I must hide the truth deep in my wounded heart, and advance silently, taking oblivion and falsehood as my guide . . ." ("Shangshi" 130; "Regret" 215). Evidently, here and elsewhere in the dominant literary discourse of the May Fourth period, the other is often represented as the cause of the selfs despair, which in turn becomes (ironically) the very incentive needed for any further undertaking of women's liberation as a reason for revolution. The basic contradiction here lies in the fact that while Zijun has no doubt failed to live up to an equivalent of the revolutionary idealism of a Shelley or an Ibsen, Juansheng is likewise not able to bear the indisputable thought that, in the face of all the historical constraints for any revolution, he has also forgotten to allow his wife the opportunities to become what she might have learned from his discourse. What happens to the Chinese Nora after she has left home? Perhaps Lu Xun's answer is given in the impossibility of a genuine representation of Zijun by her man Juansheng. For the latter might have been able to read her body and soul like a book within the framework of a story of despair, but he cannot in his reading allow her to intervene and articulate her-self in language. As a result, no authentic discourse of the "other" is represented. To put it differently, if his own self is to occupy a place somewhere between the dogs and the chickens, then the other questions he has forgotten to ask would perhaps be: What is the position of the woman? How is the site of her other self defined? Textually speaking, where is she to be found?

♦

Similar traces of this form of objectification can be identified in Yu Dafu, whose works can even better illustrate the question of alienation/representation of "self' from/in the "other." Through the organiza- tion of a despair, the intensification of the subjective crisis is achieved. Language mediates and produces a subjectivity caught in despair. And in almost all of Yu's heroes one can see the integrity of selfhood both shaken and re-assembled as the result of an "explosion" of alterity in one form or another. This radical recognition of the alterity of woman, as one may expect, ends up with different possible consequences: the "other" is either more repressed, or it is more free.

2 For a detailed analysis of split consciousness in modern Chinese realism, see my "Split Consciousness: The Dialectic of Desire in Camel Xlanga" Modem Chinese Literature 2.2 (1986): 171-95.

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In "Niaoluo xing" [The cypress vine trip], one of Yu's earlier pieces of autobiographical fiction, the narrator writes to his wife, who has just left on a train homeward bound after a short visit to him in the city. Throughout his monologue, the narrator addresses his wife as "my woman, the woman whom I can't love and can't refuse to love" (89) and belittles himself as "sincerely" as he can in every conceivable way, trying to make explicit the sentimental point that he too (an unworthy father, son, and husband) is suffering from their arranged marriage just as much as she is. The subjective narrator is supposedly engaged in writing a letter to his wife: "I" pity "you," the addressee, because "you" have epitomized in the "tenderness" and "submissiveness" [roushun] of your femininity all the virtuous norms of social behavior assigned to traditional women by the dominant hegemony. "I" pity "you" for your weakness as a woman, and yet "I" have gotten used to tyrannizing [ttuedai] "you" simply because "you" are my woman [wode miren ]. And as your man, "I" can't see why "you" wouldn't want to put the blame on "me." But to be frank enough, "I" am just as vulnerable as "you" are, only less responsible and respectful than "you" could possibly imagine. At times, "I" might have missed "you" and the child, and even shed some tears for "you"; but when "I" had to come face to face with my own survival, "I" didn't hesitate to sell the diamond ring "you" had given "me" as a wedding token. "I" know for certain that "I" have no right whatsoever to even talk about "existence" in this world. Yet, when "I" meditated about suicide, and attempted just that several times, the thought never once crossed my mind as to what might happen to "you" should "I" simply disappear from this world. But then "I" thought (and still think so now) that the responsibility could not be mine alone. It was, after all, the responsibility of "my parents," of "your parents," and of "our society, our nation." "You" are therefore but an innocent scapegoat, paying for the crimes that society has committed day after day, generation after generation. The root of your suffering is to be found in my own inability to right the wrongs that society has done me. It goes without saying that, unlike Lu Xun's Juansheng, who has tried to ask for Zijun's forgiveness and regretted not having made her happier by sparing her "the truth," Yu Dafu's anti-hero is much more self-repulsive, and hence, paradoxically, self-indulgent. In Yu's works, the absent "other" is usually indicated in her implied relation with the "self' as a marginal character repressed by the power structurally integrated into the social relations under patriarchy. Thus, for the narrative "I" in "The Cypress Vine Trip," my woman, or sometimes in its pure form, woman, is somebody to whom "I" can represent Her life, her fate, her suffering, her vulnerability, her sexuality, and her despair - all these "I" can assertively represent within the constraints of our social hegemony, became, after all, her identity is nowhere recognizable except in me, and, ironically, my sense of alienation nowhere nourishable but in the marginality - if not the impossibility - of

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"her self." For Yu, typically in his representation of the dominant discourse, "I" am everything except a decent soul, waiting to be eliminated any moment from this earth; "I" am a superfluous nobody, a reservoir of neurotic anxiety, the epitome of human despair. And still it is with this emptiness of selfhood that "I" long to fill the void of her otherness, thus articulating the emptiness in her and asserting it as woman-hood. It is with this absence of self-identity (of the value and meaning of "self') that "I" desire the presence of alterity, the sublimation of that long-repressed "other." But caught inside the hegemony the repressed can have no speech. And as "I" know her so thoroughly well, "I" will speak of her crisis through my-self and try to articulate my despair in her and for her. But the reverse of all this was certainly not possible in the history of modern China. For, notwithstanding Yu Dafu's attempt at self-denial, it was the voice of his woman that remained "superfluous," though her body might not appear so. She rarely spoke, as a matter of course; and even if she did occasionally, few would be there to listen - except perhaps her "man," the omnipresent "I," the legitimate subject of all discourse. Just as her silence was by custom considered synonymous with her very redundan- cy, an occasional utterance attributed to her was deemed strategically critical for the final redemption of his lost self, his degraded manhood. Whatever their intrinsic values to the woman might be, the silence and the utterance together constituted a major part of the structural functions and narrative values she carried within the hegemonic order of the Confucian patriarchy. Hence, in such works as "The Cypress Vine Trip," "Chenlun" [Sink- ing], "Yinhuisedesi" [Silvery gray death], and "Yenying" [Smoky shadows], the "other" is virtually voiceless. She is either a desexualized woman sitting helplessly at home with her feet bound, or she is transformed into a sexual fetish waiting mindlessly in a brothel with her legs crossed. Her discourse, if any, is almost always mediated by the solitary consciousness of the man who, whenever in despair, would drop by to talk. But there are also cases more subtle than this. The woman ("my woman") in "Yigeren zai tushang" [Alone on the road]) does speak, though largely with a nightmarish voice. Her little child, named Long, or Dragon, has just died; broken-hearted, she believes she hears him calling "mama" in her dreams. She wakes up to her man, crying "Do you hear? Do you hear?" He never responds, like the "solitary reaper" he considers himself to be. "Indeed," she finally manages to pull herself together and utter in a single breath, "Long is back." It is indeed in the Dragon that man and woman find a common symbolic reason to believe. With such a counteractive attempt to re-present the voiceless paradox of the modern identity crisis, Yu Dafu has revealed the contradic- tory nature of a discourse both too patronizing and repulsive, too narcis- sistic and nihilistic, to be considered in any conventional sense "realist."

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(But whether realist or not, the form by itself is not a yardstick of the ethical, much less aesthetic, value of the work. Rather, it is the vehicle through which symptoms of ethical and aesthetic predispositions might be disclosed. Despair, a specific form of the modern emotion, mediates by objectifying the contradictions within the social relations that generated the historical crisis of May Fourth in both its ethical and aesthetic dimen- sions. Understood in its proper historical context, form transforms, and is transformed by, the dynamics of reality. And if one would not hesitate to call that specific form "realist" in this particular sense, then all literature of the May Fourth era, Yu Dafu's works not excluded, might well be put under its broad rubric.) To further substantiate my argument, let me take the quintessential prose narrative of Yu Dafu, "Chunfeng chenzuide wanshang" [Intoxicating spring nights], written in the summer of 1923. Here, Yu's anti-hero narrates a story about himself and a cigarette-factory girl who speaks only in a southern rural dialect. They are now very close neighbors, sharing the same attic in a Shanghai slum area. Strangers as they are, they seldom talk; they seldom even see each other. She works ten hours a day wrapping cigarettes in the factory; he reads, writes, and stretches himself mindlessly during the day time, sneaks into the city streets at night to mail his manuscripts, and allows himself to be "intoxicated" by the deranging breeze till another weary day dawns in the late spring of Shanghai. Thus, for a short while, they are two housemates, each locked up in a "free prison," alienated each in a unique way from the latest cultural fashions and political currents of a quasi-colonial Shanghai. One day, back from a whole day's labor, and more silent than ever before, she walks up to him, musters her courage, and asks him what strange books he has been reading all day long, what evil deeds he might be engaged in during his nightly excursions, and if he would care to stop smoking, or at least to stop smoking the brand of cigarettes she wraps every day in her factory, the place she so desperately hates. The whole situation is in an extraordinary way both a climax and an anti-climax for our deeply frustrated (sexually and otherwise) hero; it actually conjures up for him a moment of extreme ethical as well as psychopathological tensions. In typical Yu Dafu style, this moment of crisis soon turns into a discourse of perverted and ecstatic sentimentalism, as the perversion and ecstasy finally culminate in an orgy of neurotic monologue that permits the overflow of some veiy intense feelings - expressions of desire, disillusion, and despair. It highlights, in effect, a moment of ethical conflicts and psychic anxieties in which everything dehumanizing in the external world becomes revitalized through an aesthetic undercurrent. Instead of normalizing the subjective experience in accordance with estab- lished moral codes, this libidinal discourse radicalizes it by reiterating the futility of the self's attempt to embody and empower (ethically but also textually) a transparent "other" in the dark cell of the ego.

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We may now recall that, with Lu Xun, the crisis of identity is also expressed in the selfs symbiotic containment of the other. In "Regret for the Past," the loss of woman is what posits man as the dominant subject of discourse; at the same time, such a representation of the alienated self is rendered historically viable only through the ideological representation of the marginal position of the "other" - an objectification of that empty site of a disengaging past. The whole process is then significantly radicalized, as we have seen, by Yu Dafu, to the extent that the absence of "other" not only helps project the presence of self, but the introjection of otherness onto selfhood also makes it possible for the alterity of a non-being - woman - to intrude into the integral realm of being and disturb the estab- lished hierarchy of consciousness. Mao Dun, on the other hand, starts off with a more orthodox Western realist precept that any objective datum of reality is separable from subjectivity before the process of representation has even taken place. Jaroslav Průšek has pointed out that in order to achieve objectivity, Mao Dun would erase any subjective voice from his narrative: "There is no trace of the story's being related by anybody. The author's aim is for us to see everything, feel and experience everything directly, to eliminate any intermediary between the reader and what is described in the novel" (123). While it is doubtful that Mao Dun actually succeeds in erasing traces of subjectivity from his narratives, one can readily discern in them an entirely different kind of discursive practice than the one undertaken by Yu Dafu, for whom, in Prûsek's words again, "everything is viewed from a single [subjective] angle; that ever-shifting dynamic perspective which we discovered in the work of Mao Dun has here no place" (159). Hence, in Ye qiangwei [Wild roses], Mao Dun's first collection of short stories, published in 1929, all the female protagonists are given in "new woman" images of one type or another. Their identity problems, however, should be read as part of a broader problem of representation within which the dilemma of their ethical revolts against the dominant hegemony might then be contemplated. There are two reasons why this problem has seldom been directly addressed. Primarily, the omnipresence of a subject of intel- lect freshly released from the repressive system of Confucianism had made it relatively difficult for crises of alterity (the otherness of self) to be brought effectively into emergent power relations within the new cultural hierarchy. Also, the emergence of a trend of decadent intellectualism among a significant portion of the new writers further hindered the spread of any alternative rationality at a time when the insurgent forces of revolution were fully legitimized in the name of Mr. De (Democracy) and Mr. Sai (Science). As a result, it becomes difficult to identify in Mao Dun's

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 (Verf. 4, 1988) portrayal of women a consistent voice through which the hitherto repressed crisis of female subjectivity can be clearly implied. One of the major outcomes of the May Fourth cultural revolution was a common intellectual concern for the formation of self and individuality. But to recognize the subjective crisis of identity as part of a more collective crisis of history was also considered an important function of art by many writers, especially those affiliated with the Association for Literáty Studies, the center of the so-called realist school, of which Mao Dun was a major spokesman. Still, rather unlike Yu Dafu's more ostensible attempt at alienating the self from the other, the introspective strategy of Mao Dun's realism never allows him to treat the collective crisis of identity from an authentically subjective point of view. But even though the realist's critical discourse can turn inward to self, penetrating a hidden reality where the root of the changing condition of history might be identified, his writings seldom go deep enough to expose the private shades of consciousness. By the same token, lacking a committed voice to speak of their otherness, the "new women" in Mao Dun's early works do not appear disturbed or even concerned enough to be able to experience the turbulent sociocultural crisis as concrete problems of the subject. The dilemma of representation is thus materialized in the search for a language that might objectify inner contradictions as radically and effectively as it would intensify external ones. In his preface to Wild Roses , Mao Dun complains that most people of his time could not recognize what the "real" [zhenshi] truly was; he urges them to reconsider their attitudes toward "reality" [xianshi], asking them not to sentimentalize any more over the past, or idealize the future, but:

to focus their vision on the present 'panshi], to analyze reality [xianshi], and to unveil the real [xianshi]. ( Mao Dun lun chuangzuo 49-50)

In Mao Dun's own fashion, there is clearly a conflation of several similar yet nonequivalent concepts into the one notion of xianshi, the root for the Chinese term xianshi zhuyi, or realism. The "real" is taken here, quite naturally, to refer to the moment of the "present" | xianzai], whose protracted course in its contemporary history the realist would try to grasp. It is also, of course, the represented and representable "external" reality, of the "real world" [xianshi shije ], upon the basis of which all the critical and analytical functions of realism are to be carried out. Finally, the "real" is the inner "essence" of reality, closer to a more definite notion of "truth" [. zhenshi ] than to its divergent ramifications in the objective world; the immediate structure of its appearance has therefore to be dismantled before its underlying bedrock becomes fully visible. In Mao Dun's own view, all the female protagonists in Wild Roses are being taught this lesson of "reality" 'xianshi] - that to capture the ultimate essence of the future of

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China is to recognize the historical necessity of the present in its darkest, cruelest, and most improbable representation out there in the "real" objective world. Failure to recognize the various layers of "reality" in the changing society of their time often causes great disillusionment among the women represented by Mao Dun in his early stories. Death, for example, seems to be the only solution for Miss Huan in "Zisha" [Suicide], as she discovers that the man whose child she carries has now gone to war. His sudden disappearance could mean that her loss of virginity would be left entirely unjustified by society, that the absence of her patron (who has left home to sacrifice himself in the name of the greater nation-family) could only be honored by the complete extinction of her own self, body and soul together. Hence, having dreamt that her man did return, but opted not to become her husband, Miss Huan wakes up from the contingent traps of reality and spells out, in despair, and in acknow- ledgement of the irrefutable reality of life, that "I am not myself any more." It is, after all, the painful moment of the present that she cannot endure; it is the monstrosity of the real world that she will not live to see; it is also the irrationality of truth that she has refrained from comprehending. In the whole world in which she speaks (or rather mumbles, laments), and is spoken of (by her foster family, by her omniscient narrator), there is not one person whom she can blame or to whom she can simply talk. Huan is not necessarily among Mao Dun's most successful representations of woman; but in the simple form of its narrative, the author has given us the gist of his realistic principle of representation. Evidently, Huan's story is told in a discourse with no real interlocutors, no authentic speaking subject. And Mao Dun's often ambiguous attachment to a quasi-impersonal mode further makes it difficult for one to trace the formation of an integral subject in the way one would be able to discuss Yu Dafu's constitution of self in an objectified other. The realist, within the frame of his model of representation, has indeed tried to refocus the question of subjectivity regarding women's persistent attempts at becoming conscious agents of revolution. But his own ethical consistency is often undermined by an aesthetic tendency in his language to mitigate, if not vulgarize, the articulation of any alternative voice of the woman. In the Eclipse trilogy, for instance, Jing oiHuanmie [Disillusioned] is a young woman who wants to plunge herself into the turbulent currents of revolution to learn about the essence and reality of her self. Being "quiet" [jing] by nature and self-consciously "new" in intellectual character, Jing finds herself caught in a dilemma of having to choose between reality and idealism. She is also unwilling and unable to recognize the ironic twist of life that, in revolutionary times, suggests that not to fall in "love" of your own "free will" is tantamount to committing a reactionary crime com- parable to that of "counterrevolution" ( Shi 70). The test of "love," as it were, constitutes for her a personal and emotional limit beyond which the

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 (Voi. 4, 1988) revolutionary zeal must stride before one can become a politically conscious and ethically responsible revolutionary. Inexperienced, Jing escapes into a hospital after an initial failure in the "test." There she expects to seek refuge for her defeated spirit; she fakes illness, runs a real fever, and takes in a strong dose of political medicine from her doctor, himself a new intellectual of the conservative camp. His didacticism notwithstanding, the doctor's treatment is enough to transform Jing overnight from an ivory- tower pessimist into a red-hot patriot. She soon devotes herself to the Women's Liberation Movement and, when disillusioned, hastens to join the revolutionary front at Wuhan as a last resort in her search for her lost identity. But amid bureaucracy and corruption, Jing is taken ill again in a state of despair. During this hospitalization, her final chance for resurrec- tion arrives with the entrance of the wounded soldier Qiang Meng ("strong" and "vigorous"), a self-described "futurist" who believes that dying on the battlefield is an ecstatic experience worth the price of a mundane and inert life. Qiang's world, she realizes, is one of glamor, honor, power, and destruction. He is also a lover of blood; and to complete the caricature, Mao Dun adds that, as a result of war, blood has been shed for the nipple our hero has lost from his left breast. Contrasted with Jing, Qiang is passion and sensuality reincarnated. With him, the heroine experiences a love that soars high into the mountain air, to the extent that its link to life has been completely cut off. She has previously refused to equate love with anything physical, but is now allowing herself to be loved frantically by a man whose one goal in life is to die sensuously in war. And for a very brief moment, high up on the mountain, they consummate their love. In the very irrationality of his (alien and alienated) ideal, she seems to have found a temporary sanctuary for her long-frustrated "self." It is evident that Mao Dun is eager to expose the existing conflicts among many young men and women of his generation between the pursuit of identity and rationality on the one hand, and the tendency to indulge in sensual and emotional expression of their ego on the other. But given the ethical consciousness on the author's part, his narrative fails to situate the woman effectively in a discourse that would subject her to any concrete crisis pertaining to the collective experience of the "new women" as an emergent category of subjectivity. Jing's helplessness, after all, is never represented as a crisis of consciousness that might begin to undermine the totality of the social structure or cast in radical doubts the overall ethical order of the traditional culture. Instead, the "impersonal" mode of the narrative adopted by the author often ends with a melodramatic aftermath of disillusionment by, for example, presenting Jing first as a man-hater, and then as a clear-minded progressive who suddenly comes to realize that her rational repression of sensual desire is as beneficial to the revolution as the armed man's frantic passion to shed blood on the battlefield of his unseemly imagination.

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Mao Dun's early works of realism, one may conclude, have not brought forth a discursive voice substantial enough to articulate the complexity of subjectivity and its crisis. When Qiang indulges himself in calling the different parts of Jing's body by the names of the various historical sites they have visited on the mountain, and when he permits himself to compare the frenzy of the war experience to the first experience of love by a woman on her wedding night, it is plainly impossible for a reader to project such idiosyncratic mannerisms onto the broader questions of cultural and historical crises. Properly speaking, Qiang does not even play the role of a patriarch; in its form of an ethical counter-ideal, his image remains too abstract to become aesthetically compelling. The absence of a dominant male voice, at the same time, does not imply immediate success for Mao Dun's representation of the female subject. For despite his attempt to introject the historical moment onto the personal crisis of the "other," the language of his realism fails to materialize that crisis as the inner crisis of a conscious "self." Hence, even though Huan or Jing, or any other woman, might have been framed to represent an objective picture of reality, the discourse that is supposed to deliver the problem does not appear dynamic enough to capture the critical condition of her subjectivity. If such a contradiction is found consistently throughout the Eclipse trilogy and the Wild Roses collection of stories, it may then be generalized that realism, as practiced by Mao Dun in the early stage of his career, operates on two interrelated levels. Initially, the realist principle governing most of his narratives implies not so much a strict degree of truthfulness to external conditions in the "real world" (despite his frequent exercise in the naturalistic depiction of details), as a tendency to adhere to a properly objective vision of reality under which a more viable form of existence is made available for the protagonists, often women, in crisis. In form, the ethical dilemma of the May Fourth intellectuals is recognizable as the question of representation. Hence, while Yu Dafu's anti-heroes end up introjecting the exterior "other" onto the privacy of an absolute "self," the apparent lack of an integral subject in Mao Dun tends to allow the women's voice to be heard in a more explicit form. Since, for example, no absolute authority is fully embodied in such male personalities as Junshi in "Chuangzao" [Creation] or Youth Bing in "Shi yu sanwen" [Poetry and prose], images of "new women" like Xianxian and Madame Gui in the respective stories appear more provocative than their counterparts in Lu Xun or Yu Dafu. This absence of a dominant voice, however, does not provide the necessary freedom for these women to articulate for themsel- ves, and lay out for their readers, the inner contradictions they experience in trying to cope with the social crisis of reality. For Yu Dafu, the objectifying process of crisis has its dialectical counterpart in the internalization of a collective condition of consciousness distinguishable, if not separable, from the individual concerns for ethical and emotional frustration. Indeed,

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 works of Yu Dafu, Lu Xun, and Mao Dun are all directed toward disclosing the inner dilemma of the new intellectual. But as a result of the extreme subjectivism of his form, Yu's discourse may actually be considered more introspective (Průsek 144). Lu Xun's attempt, by comparison, is to provide a more objectively framed narrative for his subject-in-crisis. Hence, his "silent" narrator (such as Juansheng) often urges us to set free the solitary consciousness of the ego in a discursive form open enough to allow the struggle for that freedom to be integrated as part of a collective problematic materialized through the experience of typical individuals (such as Ah Q). Mao Dun's effort, viewed from this perspective, is to rewrite conscien- tiously the process of representation as a pervasive sociohistorical narrative that aims at penetrating all crises of consciousness and locating them within the more objective contradictions in reality. This brings us to the second general level of his realism. For it must be remembered that one of the reasons why Mao Dun chose the realist form as his mode of representation was that realism seemed to display more readily a vast spectrum of objective reality within the constraints of a single text. In this sense, the overall principle of his realism may also be considered extrospective by virtue of its orientation toward the representation of more immediate historical events upon which the subjective dilemma of individuals would be grounded. This is evidently the way in which the Eclipse trilogy was con- structed by Mao Dun. The three individual works in it can be taken together as a historical chronicle of various moments in the short-lived glory of the 1927 Great Revolution. But because of the contemporaneousness and immediacy of the revolution to the author, the characters, and the readers of the time, the very ideal of the "objective" form remains, precisely, an ideal. In other words, whereas the aesthetic vision of history is transformed into (and created through) the subjective crisis of the new women, the form itself can only become ethically viable when it is also taken to be an objective representation of the betrayed revolution. This radical objectification, as I have suggested, is accomplished through the aesthetic formation of despair. For Yu Dafu, the neurotic monologue of the subject is not only a cultural representation of the alterity pertaining to women's experience in new China, but the discourse of self also necessitates the paradox of representation that forever undermines, though never eliminates, the authenticity of the otherness thus articulated. The result is that, whereas Lu Xun has succeeded in foregrounding the deep sense of alienation the entire generation of May Fourth intellectuals would have experienced in the face of overwhelming pressures exerted by the traditional hegemony, Yu Dafu accentuates rather the crisis of a solitary consciousness in its unnameable desire to at once express and repress the ever-increasing frustration of Chinese intellectuals in their attempt to transform, by transcoding, all external social crises into the

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 aesthetic dimension. And if Lu Xun's sympathetic narrator is primarily interested in reiterating the symbolic logic of the story it relates, and Yu Dafu's dejected anti-hero is mostly indulgent in his solitary discourse of despair, Mao Dun's relatively "impersonal" subjects are often less concerned about how well their voices can be heard than with what course of events their narrative frames should capture in order to achieve the panoramic vision of a "total" objective form. Thus, to capture the modern crisis of representation in its proper problematic amid the May Fourth intellectuals is, in effect, to read the dominant story of that crisis as a story about the sociopathological condition of its formation. It is only by re-enacting the interactions of text and subtext that one can begin to analyze the semantic logic of any ostensible stoiy of crisis. In this study, the form of that crisis is captured as despair - understood as the specific tendency in literary discourse to deal with the extinction of hope, the utter loss of the will to discourse, and the disbelief in actions and ideas of any positive value. By identifying such a problematic of representation in a discourse on the "new women," as it might have emerged within the particular aesthetic and historical frames of reference of their time, I have attempted to read the dilemma of modern Chinese realism as a crisis in the formation of "self' for the women within a "new" sociocultural space still very much organized by a language that spoke of despair through the patriarchal voice. In the process of its formation, despair becomes, therefore, the utterance of a marginal subject whose enunciations can hardly express a dynamic self-sustainable by the objective constraints of life. Indeed, the language of despair can only speak of an external reality that would appear neither pure nor eternal. As a result, it seems that the solitude and inertia that constitute the consciousness of despair are rooted not so much in myth or fetishism as in the form of history - in the story of collective crisis, the discourse of love and revolution, of frustration and repression, in utteran- ces spoken for the new women in crisis, for any new woman in search of her-self.

WORKS CITED

Lu Xun. Selected Stories of Lu Hsun. Trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. 1960. - . "Shangshi" (1925). Lu Xun quanji [The complete works of Lu Xun]. Vol. 2. Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1981. 1 10-31. English version: "Regret for the Past." Selected Stories. 197-215. - . Yecao (1927). Lu Xun quanji. Vol. 2. 159-225. English version: Wild Grass. Trans. Feng Yu-sheng. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1974. Lukács, Georg. Soul and Form ( 1910). Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, Mass.: МГГ Press, 1974. Mao Dun. Mao Dun lun chuangzuo [Mao Dun on creative activities]. Ed. Ye Ziming. Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, 1980.

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- . Shi [Eclipse]. Shanghai: Kaiming, 1929. - . Ye qiangwei [Wild roses]. Shanghai: Dajiang, 1929. A collection of short stories containing "Chuangzao" [Creation], "Shi yu sanwen" [Poetry and prose], and "Zisha" [Suicide]. Marcuse, Herbert. Reason and Revolution (1941). New York: Oxford UP, 1960. Pr ûSek, Jaroslav. The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature . Ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980. Yu Dafii. Chenlun (1921). Rpt. N.p.: Tianxia, 1974. Contains: "Chenlun" [Sinking] and "Yinhuise de si" [Silvery gray death]. - . Dafu zixuanji [An anthology compiled by the author]. N.p.: Tianma, 1932. Rpt. Hong Kong: Lianhe, n.d. Contains: "Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang" [Intoxicating spring nights], "Yenying" [Smoky shadows], and "Yigeren zai tushang" [Alone on the road]. - . "Niaoluo xing" [The cypress vine trip] (1923). Zhongguo xinwenxue dœà . Vol. 5. Ed. Zhao Jiabi. Shanghai: Liangyou, 1935. 89-102.

GLOSSARY

"Chenlun" A A „ "Chuangzao" «*.]£» "Chunfeng chenzui de wanshang" Da/UÂ"',"'Ï HuanmU JÌng # LuXun .fib Lu Xun quartfi «*й**» Mao Dun lun chuangzuo )) "Niaoluo xing" nuedai д ^ roushun HcJfó "Shangshi" " 0 Shi «**» "Shi yu sanwen" л -ft iL w xianshi

xianshi shijie xianshi zhuyi Ì

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 xin mixing wode nüren 4i. ià dr A Yecao «*f£» "Yenying" um%" Ye qiangwei «Jf-fc-fc» YeZiming Ж-fífc "Yigeren zai tushang" u - "Yinhuise de si" u ft" Yu Dafu Щ i£ £ Zhao Jiabi Zhongguo xinwenxue daxi ((t ill» "Zhufu" "fait," "Zisha" « I)

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