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V. Coda: modernities and historicities As a campaign for literary and cultural modernization, the May Fourth Move- ment derived its polemical momentum and affective power from radical antitraditionalism. By drawing a boundary between the new and the old, advocates of New Literature fostered a discourse involving such thematic axes as decadence versus enlightenment, reaction versus revolution, “canni- balism” versus humanism, and darkness versus brightness. Crossing “the Gate of Darkness,” in Lu Xun’s terminology, they aspired to a project of modernization that would highlight nationalism, follow a timeline leading to progress, and create a new kind of citizen who could live in complete autonomy. This agenda, however, could not overlook the fact that modern Chinese literature could not do away with its past. Indeed, the tortuous way in which post-May Fourth literati and intellectuals revoked, invented, and uncannily reinstated Chinese history is the most conspicuous aspect of Chinese literary modernity. If modernity is not to be fetishized into a linear movement unerringly aimed at a prescribed telos, the historicity of the modern had con- tinually to be questioned in response to the outrageous imagination of futures bred in the past, and the unexpected consequences of reducing all imagination to a single task, that of ending history. This brings us to the paradoxical observation that writing and reading literary history (in the way we understand it) is an “invention” of modern times. In the last decades of the Qing, traditional epistemological and pedagogical systems were shaken up and gradually superseded by a Western-inspired disciplinary matrix. The old model of learning ended when the civil service examination system was abolished and new curricula were institutionalized. In the humanities, this prompted reformers to translate classical Chinese learning into a Europeanized framework. One of the disciplinary subjects they now addressed was literary history. At a time when national identity was tied to national history, writers and scholars endeavored to forge a discourse reﬂecting literature as the core of the national heritage. Literary history, in this sense, is a modern project informed by a prescribed timeline and a national imaginary. The earliest Chinese literary history, as newly deﬁned, was The History of Chinese Literature (Zhongguo wenxueshi) written in 1904 by a young teacher, Lin Chuanjia (1877–1922)ofthe Great Learning Institute of the Capital (the precursor of Peking University). The writing and publication of the History of Chinese Literature had to do with the recent mounting of “literature” as one of the disciplinary subjects of the institute. Lin drafted the history in a rush to meet his teaching needs, and he

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011 Chinese literature from 1841 to 1937 did so with the institute’s curricular policy in mind; that is, studying literature primarily as an aid to prose composition and rhetorical training. Although modeled after the Japanese scholar Sasagawa Rinpu’s¯ History of Chinese Liter- ature (1898), Lin’s version is an eclectic exercise comprising genre classifica- tion, philological inquiry, and chronological periodization. This hybrid form reflects Lin’s own ambivalent attitude toward literature as an aesthetic con- struct. He highlights the vicissitudes of intellectual history from Confucius onward and describes the transformations of prose (wen) in terms of reaction to historical changes. He pays little attention to poetry and says next to nothing about vernacular fiction and drama. Above all, his vision of literature and literary history is closely related to conventional notions about literature as serving utilitarian and didactic functions. After Lin Chuanjia’s preliminary attempt, the writing of literary history developed in parallel with the New Literature Movement. Reconstructing the past became a way to assert the power of the modern. For instance, in 1922,HuShipublishedAHistoryofLiteratureinthePastFiftyYears(Wushi nianlai zhi zhongguo wenxue), in which he pits the new and “living” literature against the old “dead” and “half-dead” literature. Implied in his historical account is a paradigm of evolutionism and organism, while vernacular language is hailed as a springboard for literary rejuvenation. At the same time, Zhou Zuoren proffered a view of literary development based on the perennial dialogue between two classical notions, that “literature is a vehicle of the Dao” and that “literature expresses intent.” Zhou also ventures to trace the origin of Chinese literary modernity to the late Ming, when literati sought to express themselves under the inspiration of the Wang Yangming school of Confucianism. Another notable trend appears in A History of Late Qing Fiction (Wanqing xiaoshuo shi, 1937) by Ah Ying (Qian Xingcun). Classifying late Qing fiction according to political and social topics, the book is the first modern attempt to look back at this period from a leftist, sociological perspective. Even as literary history was institutionalized as a discipline, a movement arose to try to either discover or disavow the “essence” of Chinese literature and culture. Insofar as they express a heightened anxiety about China’s fate as reflected in literature, May Fourth writers show what C. T. Hsia, in his critique of modern Chinese writers, terms an “obsession with China.” For Hsia, while Chinese writers share with their Western colleagues a general disgust with the consequences of modern civilization, they are preoccupied by their national crisis and historical malaise to such an extent that they are unable, or unwilling, to expound the moral and political relevance of the fate of the Chinese people to “the state of man in the modern world.”

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At their best, he argues, Chinese writers feel compelled to display in their works a high moral integrity rarely found among contemporary Western writers, but the price they pay for such an “obsession with China” is “a certain patriotic provinciality and a naivete´ of faith with regard to better conditions elsewhere.” Whereas May Fourth reformers try to create a new Chinese identity – be it called national character, national literature, or national culture – by denying the past, the conservatives set out to safeguard the past as the only way of preserving the quintessential legacy of China. One of the earliest and most influential attempts was formulated by Liu Shipei in the context of the “national essence” (guocui) movement. Together with his peers, such as Zhang Binglin, Liu forged a grand narrative of ancient Chinese cultural and intellectual history as the foundation of a new national learning. Anachronistic as this radical effort at reviving antiquity may seem, Liu demonstrates an “obsession with China” typical of both the reformers and the conservatives in late Qing and early Republican China. Another important figure with a revivalist outlook is Liang Shuming (1893– 1988), the first prominent scholar of the May Fourth era to defend Confucian tradition in a systematic way. Liang’s Eastern and Western Civilizations and Their Philosophies (Dongxi wenhua jiqi zhexue, 1921)providesanoverarching view of the Chinese, Indian, and Western philosophical traditions and their modern ramifications; it would become a harbinger of the neo-Confucian movement. Meanwhile, there arose a call for classicism by a group of scholars, such as Mei Guangdi and Wu Mi, who also shared a similar educational background and cultural commitment. As mentioned above, they founded the journal Critical Review in 1921 to propagate their ideals of humanism, decorum, and cultural rejuvenation based on the classical Chinese heritage. These scholars had mostly been educated overseas and as such were not conservatives in the traditional sense. Their encounter with Western intellectual resources, particularly the new humanism of Irving Babbitt, prodded them to reexam- ine Chinese culture. They wanted to open a dialogue with the humanist tradition in Western culture, hence their slogan: “Interpret the spirit of Chi- nese culture and introduce the best elements of Western philosophy and literature.” May Fourth literati also set out to reassess select historical moments so as to find alternative resources for Chinese modernity. For instance, Lu Xun showed a particular interest in the literati culture of the Six Dynasties. In “The Literati Mannerism of the Wei and Jin, and Its Relation to Poetry, Drugs, and

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Wine” (Weijin fengdu ji wenzhang yu yao ji jiu de guanxi, 1927), he renders acompellinganalysisoftheinsouciantattitudeandapparentlydecadent lifestyle of the literati of the Six Dynasties, one of the most turbulent periods in premodern Chinese history. The essay implies a critique of contemporary China as well as of behavioral strategies in coping with political perils and cultural crises. Zhu Guangqian, on the other hand, finds in the chaos of the Six Dynasties the unlikely blossoming of an aesthetics of quietude and transcendence, something he believes to be as essential as Kantian aesthetics to remolding modern Chinese subjectivity. And, as discussed earlier, Hu Shi dedicated himself to the rediscovery of vernacular tradition from the Song to the Qing as the origin of the modern Chinese renaissance, while Zhou Zuoren harked back to the late Ming as the incipient moment of Chinese humanist emancipation. Ironically, mainstream May Fourth writers and critics downgraded late Qing writers while appointing themselves the first-generation promoters of modernity. Yet there were other, subtler reasons for denigrating late Qing literature: more than the remainder of an obsolete literary past, it was also the reminder of the residual tradition always lurking behind the façade of modern discourse. By consigning that which is at present undesirable to a disposable legacy from the past, enlightened Chinese literati hoped to “clean up” their project of modernity. In other words, they explained away the unwelcome aspects of their attempts at modernity by displacing them into a past that was already over. But one might ask these paradoxical questions: is this modern discourse they are protecting from contamination really modern, or does it only seem modern? Is it not possible that the undesirable and unwelcome burdens of modern Chinese literature are derived not from the past but from too radical, or too modern, sources? In literary practice, what makes writers such as Lu Xun and Shen Congwen outstanding is that their works bear witness to the treacherous terms of articulating modernity under the shadow of tradition. They are aware that, beyond palpable signs of the new and progressive, something else – something that cannot be squared with any ready-made models – has been held back in consensual discourse. Ironically, their constant attempts to come to grips with that underrepresented realm of cultural and political projects of modernity, followed often by their “failures” to do so, brings out some of the most engaging moments of modern Chinese literature. Though he may play upon the grotesque elements of the late Qing expose,´ Lu Xun actually derives his theory of reality and realism from the orthodox treatises of critics such as Yan Fu and Liang Qichao. The Russian scholar

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V. I. Semanov calls attention to Lu Xun’s creative interpretation of the late Qing literary legacy, particularly the figures and tropes of the expose.´ The frame structure of “The Diary of a Madman,” for example, reminds one of the opening of Wu Jianren’s Eyewitness Reports.Nevertheless,LuXun’sdogged search for a new realm of Chinese reality entails an intense personal drama of moral anxiety and ambiguity. Somewhere behind his Promethean posture, there hovers a prevailing cynicism that successfully combines enlightenment with resignation and apathy. Above all, ghosts and demons from the world of the past find every possible way to haunt this enlightened realist. Exorcism remains the leitmotif of Lu Xun’s life and literature. Lu Xun’s creative reinterpretation of antecedents culminates in Old Stories Retold (Gushi xinbian, 1935), a series of rewrites of classical tales, illuminated by the light of modern political and social circumstances. Here he calls up mythological characters (such as Goddess Nuwa)¨ and historical figures (such as Confucius) and puts them in contemporary circumstances. In so doing, Lu Xun reveals both the contrast between past and present and their paradoxical similitude. Behind the seemingly allegorical intent of these stories is a horrific vacuity filled with resounding laughter. Mixing frivolity and melancholy, Old Stories Retold marks Lu Xun’s last (anti-)heroic attempt at critiquing Chinese history. Old Stories Retold created a trend of retelling old stories that went on for decades. Mao Dun, for example, in the early 1930s wrote “Daze County” (Daze xiang, 1931), resurrecting Chen Sheng and Wu Guang of the Qin Dynasty to create a parable about peasant riots of modern times, and “Stone Tablet” (Shijie, 1931), in which the unearthing of a mystical stone tablet in the prelude to Water Margin becomes the emblem of the apocalyptic awakening of leftist revolution. By contrast, the neo-sensationalist Shi Zhecun retold classical stories from a decadent, psychological point of view. In “The General’s Head” (Jiangjunditou, 1930), a Tibetan general’s hopeless infatuation with a Han Chinese girl ends in his decapitation and symbolic castration. In “Shi Xiu” (Shi Xiu, 1932), drawn from a famous episode of Water Margin,themurderof the adulterous Pan Qiaoyun by her husband and his sworn brother Shi Xiu is retold from the perspective of the latter, a misogynist who can consummate his repressed sexual desire only by violence. Aside from experimenting with new forms, a number of May Fourth writers were able practitioners of various forms of classical-style poetry, the most important genre of premodern literature. This has something to do with the fact that, having grown up in the last decades of the traditional literary canon, they did not lose their deeply ingrained literary sensibilities even after being

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011 Chinese literature from 1841 to 1937 converted to antitraditionalism. Lu Xun’s classical-style poetry, for example, has been well received for its political poignancy, as well as for his ironic use of conventional motifs and metrics. Guo Moruo, the herald of modern poetry, also composed classical-style lines on “youthful pathos” (shaonian youhuan) after the model of Gong Zizhen. It was in the hands of a writer like Yu Dafu, however, that classical poetry found a modern resonance in registering the fleeting impressions of the changing times as well as the sense of alienation resulting from the loss of cultural, political, and emotional grounding. The Czech sinologist Jaroslav Pru˚sekˇ (1906–1980) has described the dynam- ics of modern Chinese literature as one generated by the pull of two forces: the lyrical and the epic. Whereas the lyrical refers to the discovery of individual subjectivity and a desire for emancipation, the epic refers to the making of social solidarity and a will to revolution. The lyrical and the epic, accordingly, refer not so much to generic traits as to discursive modes, affective capaci- ties, and, most importantly, sociopolitical imaginings. These two modes have fueled the momentum of an entire generation of Chinese writers in their struggle for modernity. While the “lyrical” may be suggestive of the characteristic traits of Western romanticism and individualism, Pru˚sekˇ is at pains to note that it derives its dis- tinctive orientation no less from premodern Chinese poetic sensibilities. That is to say, granted their antitraditional posture, modern Chinese literati inher- ited from premodern literature, particularly from poetry and poetic discourse, a style as well as a mannerism in their crafting of a modern subjectivity. In this way, modernity and tradition form a relationship that, though necessarily antagonistic, also puts them in dialogue. Even for the modernists, the impact of the lyrical is subtly reflected by their creative transformation of the motifs, rhetoric, and imagery of classical poetry. It would be impossible to appreciate Dai Wangshu’s “Rainy Alley” without understanding that the lilac, its key image, alludes to a Tang poem; similarly, Li Jinfa’s “Deserted Woman” reminds us of the “deserted wife,” one of the major tropes in premodern literature. He Qifang and Bian Zhilin, despite their admiration for Western modernists, also resort to the opulent and decadent images of late Tang poetry when conjuring up their own visions of the Chinese wasteland. Classical-stylepoetscontinuedtocreateagainstthetrendofNewLiterature. Particularly in colonial Taiwan, old-style poetry even underwent a renaissance in the first two decades of the twentieth century. For indigenous literati, classical-style poetry was a vehicle to assert their cultural alliance with China; for Japanese colonials, in that classical-style poetry is also an important part of

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011 The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature theJapaneseliterarytradition,itbecameahandymeansofcooptingTaiwanese intellectuals. In China, in addition to names such as Wang Guowei, Chen Sanli, and Liu Yazi, Lu¨ Bicheng merits attention as a major poet of the song lyric. Although Chen had long been hailed the last talented poet in modern China, Liu managed to combine his revolutionary agenda with the posture of the engaged literatus of the classical tradition. Luwasalreadyawell-known¨ woman poet in the late Qing and early Republican era. She reached the peak of her creativity during her travels in Europe in the late 1920sandearly 1930s. The spectacle of the Alps and other landscapes enabled Lunotonlyto¨ expand the thematic repertoire of classical poetry, which had been confined to domestic topoi, but also to generate a modern, feminine vision of the sublime. By focusing on the nexus of space and gender relations, Lu’s¨ transgression of geographical and poetical boundaries worked in concert with her feminist consciousness to reshape the whole song lyric genre. At their most polemical, the practitioners of classical-style literature demon- strated their relevancy to the modern in a negative dialectic. On June 2, 1927, Wang Guowei drowned himself in the Imperial Garden in Beijing. His brief will opens with this ambiguous statement: “After fifty years of living in this world, the only thing that has not yet happened to me is death; having lived through such historical turmoil, nothing further can stain my integrity.” Wang’s death has been variously attributed to domestic and psychological perturbations, his immersion in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, his eschatolog- ical visions, and his Qing loyalism. Other factors have also made his suicide compelling to Chinese readers, then and now. As scholars have repeatedly speculated, Wang may have acted out a death wish widely entertained by fel- low intellectuals when plunged into despair by historical and cultural crises. In 1937,ChenSanlidiedduringapatriotichungerstrikeinprotestagainst the Japanese invasion in that year. Chen had been enthusiastic about political reform in his early days, but after seeing the Republican reality he styled himself the “Chinese Onlooker” (Shenzhou Xiushouren). Yet this old “reactionary” poet died for the new China he had chosen to keep at a distance. One might reprove Chen Sanli and Wang Guowei for lagging behind the spirit of their times, one that was life-affirming and submitted to the discipline of self-renewal. Insofar as their “anachronistic behavior” indicates a (deliberate) blurring of different temporalities as well as paradigms, however, they are arguably more modern than most of the self-proclaimed modern literati of their time. For, even at the beginning of the Chinese modern

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011 Chinese literature from 1841 to 1937 age, these two had already discerned temporality as something more than the staged realization of enlightenment, revolution, and corporeal transcendence. Faced with radical incompatibilities between the public and private projects of modernity, they asserted their modern freedoms negatively in willful acts of self-annihilation. Thus their suicides paradoxically testified to the emergence of a new, posttraditional Chinese subjectivity. On July 7, 1937,JapanesetroopsopenedfireontheChinesearmyatthe Marco Polo Bridge in the suburbs of Beijing. The incident set in motion the Second Sino-Japanese War. The next eight years would see China engulfed in cataclysmic upheavals, including the Nanjing Massacre, the establishment of puppet regimes in Beijing and Nanjing, bloody crackdowns and persecutions, and the exodus of more than twenty million Chinese to southwest China, where the Nationalist regime still held power. The war brought the development of the various literary movements to a halt. By the mid-1930s, Chinese literature had experienced dynamic growth in multiple directions, in which different streams – literature of engagement and Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writings, modernism and classicism, the discourse of “humor and laughter” and the discourse of “tears and blood” – crisscrossed and interacted. This vitality was made possible only by the ironic fact of historical uncertainty, and was destined to dissipate once it encountered the brutal force of violence. In view of what modern Chinese writers had already accomplished since the turn of the twentieth century, there is good reason to imagine a more diversified and creative literature had war not broken out. As it was, literature had now to subject itself to a different and, arguably, more tendentious and rigid set of conditions. Lu Xun died in late 1936 an unhappy man beset by his leftist colleagues as well as by the relentless onrush of sociopolitical circumstances. By then the Chinese Communist Party had completed its Long March into northwest China, which became its wartime base. The Party had drawn aspiring writers such as Ding Ling to join its cause and would continue to build up its political and literary strength in the following decades. Meanwhile, the magazine Les Contemporains folded in 1935,markingatentativecodatoChinesemodernism. By the eve of the war, Lin Yutang had embarked on his voyage for the United States. His literature of humor, together with its Anglo-American humanist agenda, would be difficult to carry on in wartime. Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi, which ends with the narrator’s cynical condem- nation of the once hardworking rickshaw puller as a “degenerate, selfish, unfortunate offspring of an ailing society,” was completed in 1937,itsstrident

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Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011 The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature note signaling the changing ethos among even humanitarian writers. Lao She and many other writers, from Shen Congwen to Xiao Hong, Zhang Hen- shui to Feng Zhi, would soon find themselves on the road with thousands of refugees bound for southwest China and overseas. Zhou Zuoren would choose to stay in Beijing; he ended up collaborating with the puppet regime, for which he had to pay the price after the war. Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying, the two pillars of Shanghai neo-sensationalism, were assassinated in Shanghai, in 1939 and 1940 respectively, allegedly because of their ties with Japan. Finally, the war itself would bring the career and even the life of many a writer to a premature end, the prominent cases including Xiao Hong and Wang Luyan. Almost one hundred years earlier, Gong Zizhen, on his road home after quitting office, had written about a China faced with impending change: All life in China’s nine regions depends on the thundering storm, thousands of horses all struck dumb – deplorable indeed. IurgetheLordofHeaventoshakeusupagain and grant us human talent not bound to a single kind. Written on the eve of the First Opium War, the poem imagines the cosmos brought to a standstill, and calls on the natural and supernatural powers to galvanize the current state out of stagnation. Gong’s yearning for a new voice anticipates the tenor of modern Chinese literature. For all its radical tonality, however, there lingers in the poem a skepticism about poetry as a viable form of persuasion and agency. As the first half of the poem implies, at a time when the voices of thousands of talents have already been silenced, can a single poet’s call for reform really change Heaven’s set course? So, almost a hundred years after Gong Zizhen, Chinese writers were still struggling to respond to the same concerns. In the face of the impending Sino-Japanese war, they were all the more anxious to negotiate issues such as national crisis and cultural renovation, tradition and individual talent, historicity and its modern antithesis. Underlining their search for the meaning of writing is Gong Zizhen’s “pathos,” Liang Qichao’s “new citizenship,” Lu Xun’s “call to arms” and “wandering,” and Shen Congwen’s imaginary nos- talgia for a lyrical China. Chinese literature was only just entering another stage in redefining its modernity.

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