© 2007 Anne Lijing Xu ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE SUBLIME WRITER AND THE LURE OF ACTION: MALRAUX, BRECHT, AND LU XUN ON CHINA AND BEYOND by ANNE LIJING XU A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature written under the direction of Stephen Eric Bronner and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2007 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Sublime Writer and the Lure of Action: Malraux, Brecht, and Lu Xun on China and Beyond by ANNE LIJING XU Dissertation Director: Stephen Eric Bronner In this project I analyze the life and works of three writers, André Malraux, Bertolt Brecht, and Lu Xun. These writers lived and wrote during the period of the two World Wars, when their personal and national identities were in crisis. Their search for new identities brought them to the realm of the other: while the two Western writers used China in their writing, the Chinese writer Lu Xun advocated that his nation learn from the West. However, for all three writers, the divide between the self and the other had to be and was overcome. What distinguished them from a long list of writers, who dealt with the China/West encounter in their writing, is the fact that they sought, instead of pitting China against the West, to combine the two creatively and look for redemptive values beyond the binary-driven world. The conclusions in the works analyzed here suggest to us that, to varying degrees, they succeed in their transcendence. However, their choice to move away from this transcendental world (all of them stopped creative writing and devoted their energy to political work later in their lives) leads us to suspect that one must return to the world of binaries in order to live. My conclusion is that it is the combination ii of metaphysical detachment (contemplation) and physical attachment (action) that makes life worth living. iii Acknowledgement I am deeply indebted to my dissertation advisors, Professor Stephen Bronner, Professor Janet Walker, and Professor Ban Wang, for their kindness and help throughout the preparation and writing process. Steve’s insights and suggestions have guided my writing process; Janet’s questions and corrections have helped shape and refine my presentation; and Ban’s comments and encouragements have eased many doubts and given me new hope. I am sincerely grateful for their faith in me and their continuous support in all the years I have studied with them. I am also thankful that Professor Sandy Petrey, from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, accepted the large responsibility of reading the drafts of my dissertation. In the long years of graduate study and especially in the last three years of my dissertation writing and research period, I have come to enjoy the friendship of many good men and women, who have become an inseparable part of my life. It is in their company that I have come to appreciate the worth of my own being, so thank you, Amelie, Carsten, Heidi, Jing, Jiwei, Pavel, Qin-Hong, Roy, Shaminder, Sonia, and Sowmya. Finally, to Pavan, who has seen the daily struggles and the occasional triumphs of my humble work, I dedicate this first fruit of my academic harvest. iv Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgement iv Introduction 1 Chapter One : Between Dreams and Action: Malraux’s Rediscovery of the West in China Malraux and His China 10 Malraux before the China Trilogy 14 The Failure of the Other in The Temptation of the West 16 Death and Disease in The Conquerors 25 Approaching Metamorphosis: Man’s Fate 38 Conclusion 64 Chapter Two : The Conundrum of Either/Or: Brecht’s “Chinese Commitment” From China to the World 66 Individual or Comradeship? Some Considerations on In the Swamp 69 Ends and Means: The Grey Area in The Measures Taken 77 On Morality: The “Good” Person of Setzuan? 86 The Difficult Change and the Doctrine of the Mean: The Caucasian Chalk Circle 97 Conclusion 112 Chapter Three : The Choice of One: Lu Xun and the Chinese Reality Forsaking the Immortal: Lu Xun’s Choice of the In-between 114 v Form Matters: Revolution contra Literature 117 Forward-looking Memory: Dawn Flowers Picked at Dusk (Zhaohua xishi ) 123 Incriminating China: Women, the Crowd, and Intellectuals 1. Women as China 137 2. The Gawking Crowd 147 3. The Compromised Intellectual 152 The Shadow’s Farewell: the Either/Or of Wild Grass 161 Satirical Realism 167 Conclusion 170 Conclusion 172 Appendix : The Chinese Revolution and the World Wars: 1911-1949 179 Bibliography 186 Curriculum Vita 195 vi 1 Introduction To praise the true greatness of your native land takes introspection and knowing others—awareness comes from careful comparison. … So I say that taking a nation’s spirit forward depends on how much one knows of the world. --Lu Xun, “On the Power of Mara Poetry” Surveying the long history of the encounter between the West and China, one is overwhelmed by images of exoticism, stereotypes, and ethnocentric biases, perpetuated by both Western and Chinese writers. 1 Even today, this practice of misreading and misrepresenting the other is still consciously exploited or unconsciously carried out in an age when the means of obtaining knowledge has become too readily available for us to blame our ignorance on its lack. The search for identities (personal, racial, cultural, national, etc.) has been and is still poisoned by binaries, and dictated by the paradigm of either/or. 2 However, the voices of a few original writers do burst forth in this otherwise vapid cacophony, and take us on paths forged by their own destinies. The French adventurer and statesman André Malraux (1901-1976), the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936), all living and writing their best works in the interim of the two World Wars, obliterate the despotic rule of binaries in their thinking, and declare their alliance with the in-between: the subliminal 1 For comprehensive overview and detailed analysis of the West-China encounter, particularly in the areas of philosophy and culture, see, among others, Jerome Ch’en, China and the West: Society and Culture 1815-1937 ; chapters on China in J. J. Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounters between Asian and Western Thought ; Colin Mackerras, Western Images of China ; and Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan’s Great Continent . 2 It is interesting that almost all studies of East/West literature adopt a one-way gaze: either East looking at the West (few), or vice versa (majority). See, for example, Yvonne Hsieh, From Occupation to Revolution: China through the Eyes of Loti, Claudel, Segalen, and Malraux (1895-1933) ; Colin Mackerras, Sinophiles and Sinophobes: Western Views of China ; and Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel quel. To my knowledge, no one has written a comparative study on the works of both Western and Chinese writers writing in the period of the two World Wars. 2 tension between the self and the other, the space between the extreme pulls of either and or. In the works analyzed in the following chapters, these writers are seen as engaged in a West-China dialogue, although in the novels, short stories, plays, and essays selected here, the relationship itself is never the focus, but rather serves as a context within which the writers explore more cogent issues, both existential and political, in their search for identities. Permeated through and unifying their writing is the tension that results from an intense engagement with different and often opposite worlds: the reality and the ideal, the nation and the world, the individual and the collective. In the worldwide clamor for revolution and liberation, these writers are committed to the elimination of misery and oppression in their own societies and elsewhere (all of them, at different stages of their lives and to different degrees, worked for the Communist cause); but the same ideal—the preservation or restoration of human dignity—that drives them to action also compels them to question the means by which this ideal is to be achieved, so that the urge to act or refrain from action simultaneously abets and constrains one another. The love for their respective nation and the hope for its revivification ultimately incites their pen, but they consider their nation’s fate, as shown through their writing, as inextricably intertwined with those of the others and consequently that of the world, so that in the end, their allegiance resides both/neither with their country and/nor with the world, but in the tension that at once binds and separates the two. Faced with such conundrums of commitment/non-commitment, these writers find it impossible to speak either as an individual, or as an anonymous member of the collective: one must speak with the voices of both, and simultaneously invalidating the credibility of both voices. 3 This tension’s ultimate expression is the struggle between the artist and the revolutionary as these writers create works under the double pressure of both roles. While the revolutionary desires to embrace action unconditionally, the artist contemplates the implications of absolutism. Thus, these writers can neither work under the umbrella of “art for art’s sake,” nor seek abode in the house of “all art is propaganda.” On the contrary, their power to move as artist and revolutionary derives from the symbiotic relationship of the two: the consciousness of the writer is complicated and concretized by the social and political engagements of the revolutionary, while the revolutionary’s perspective is broadened and enriched by the artist’s moral and philosophical concerns.