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The Other Chinese: Romancing the Folk in May Fourth Native Soil Fiction

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The Other Chinese: Romancing the Folk in May Fourth Native Soil Fiction Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 33.2 September 2007: 9-34 The Other Chinese: Romancing the Folk in May Fourth Native Soil Fiction Haiyan Lee University of Hong Kong and University of Colorado at Boulder Abstract Etienne Balibar has argued that no nation possesses a natural ethnic basis. And yet the “people” tends to be the most taken-for-granted entity in nationalist thought and literature. I argue in this paper that the “people” is a fictive category invented in the contested field of literary production in the early 20th century. In particular, I examine the concept of the “folk” in the works of such native soil writers as Yang Zhensheng (楊振聲), Fei Ming (廢 名), and Shen Congwen (沈從文). By contrasting the image of the folk in native soil fiction with the more familiar image of the peasants in realist fiction, I call attention to the paradoxical status of the people in the nationalist imagination. If the peasants were ignorant, unfeeling, and parochial under the pen of Lu Xun (魯迅), the folk were revealed to have preserved a deep reservoir of emotions and humanity beneath the stultifying trappings of Confucianism in native soil fiction. I aim to show that representations of the folk and the native soil were intimately bound up with the production of the modern individual as an affective moral agent and of the nation as a community of sympathy. Keywords folk, emotion, nationalism, native soil fiction Yang Zhensheng, Fei Ming, Shen Congwen 10 Concentric 33.2 September 2007 When Mao proclaimed in 1949 that the Chinese people had stood up, there seemed little doubt as to who the “Chinese people” were. One easily conjures up images of urban residents lining the streets to greet the People’s Liberation Army marching into cities, and of peasant masses being swept up by land reforms and rural collectivization. However one might judge the communist regime, the People’s Republic has a degree of legitimacy as the sovereign state of the “Chinese nation,” or at least the majority of the “Chinese people.” But Etienne Balibar has forcefully argued in his article “Racism and Nationalism” that no nation possesses a natural ethnic basis and that nationalism has to invent a fictive ethnicity by nationalizing a heterogeneous society. Immanuel Wallerstein in “The Construction of Peoplehood” similarly maintains that “peoplehood” is not a primordial social reality, but rather a construct with constantly shifting boundaries. In his classic study Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson emphasizes the crucial role played by Asian and African “bilingual intelligentsias” in the last wave of the spread of nationalist ideologies and the rise of anti-colonial nationalism. “Poised precariously over diverse monoglot populations” (Anderson 114), the bilingual intelligentsias were the first to be exposed to modern European culture and to have access to “models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state” (Anderson 116). Intellectual agency, therefore, was largely defined in nationalist terms vis-à-vis a population that needed to be nationalized, that is, made into a “people” in order to serve as the basis of the nation in the making. The nationalist invocations of the people (renmin, minjian, minsu, xiangcun, xiangtu [人民、民間、民俗、鄉村、鄉土]) came closest to the German term Volk, an essentialized, primordialist notion that must be distinguished from the Marxist notion of the masses (minzhong, qunzhong, dazhong, laodong renmin [民眾、群 眾、大眾、勞動人民]). As the foundation of the modern nation, the people as folk were both pre-modern and the historical (but not historicized) subject that shall march into modernity. Their primordiality was therefore in perennial tension with the need for them to become modern, that is, to possess the requisite characteristics of the modern universal subject.1 The mediator of this tension was the bilingual intelligentsia who, often without self-conscious acknowledgement of their role, mobilized the trope of awakening to launch the nationalization project. At most, they saw themselves as the “already-awakened” (先覺xianjue) whose mission was 1 The folk does not have a fixed or unchanging relationship to the nation. Rather, different conceptions of the nation are necessarily associated with different constructions of peoplehood. Hence the socialist nation is premised not primarily on an essentialized folk or ethnos but on a class-differentiated notion of the people as laboring masses. Lee 11 The Other Chinese to arouse the slumbering people to come face to face with their true national self and in touch with their true national essence. This meant, among other things, compelling the people to speak the language-of-the-state and to see themselves as members of a universal and yet bounded community by partaking of the new universal institutions of education, conscription, taxation, and consumption. Insofar as the intellectuals were the principal agents of the nationalizing/ modernizing drives, they should be regarded and critiqued, in Tani Barlow’s view, as colonial intellectuals.2 Speaking the language of imported truths, intellectuals constructed themselves as heroic, polyglot, and universalized modern subjects and the agents of civilization and enlightenment. Their agency and power was predicated on the co-figuration of the people as benighted, ignorant, and parochial, languishing under the tyranny of a “traditional” culture that robbed them of their vitality and humanity. But the people were also the very foundation of their legitimacy. The intellectuals were, after all, no longer the tutors of the people on behalf of the cosmic way and its temporal embodiment the emperor. Rather, their raison d’être was to remake the people in the name of the nation and its destiny. Their relationship to the people, therefore, was even more fraught with ambiguities and contradictions than that of European colonizers to the alternately derogated and romanticized “native” colonial populations. For the nationalist intellectuals, the people’s defects and deficiencies—when measured by the yardstick of universal criteria—were a painful reminder of the intellectuals’ own location as colonial subjects straddling two worlds. The people might be exasperatingly inscrutable or unresponsive, but they could not be dismissed as strangers, as radical Other. The people were no subject of idle colonial curiosity; they were rather the abiding obsession of the bilingual intelligentsia. If the “noble savage” held the hope of civilizational regeneration for European romanticists, then it was “the folk” that was the internal Other who nonetheless condensed the essential qualities of universal humanity and provided the critical trope of intellectual self-empowerment. The invention of the folk went hand in hand with the essentializing critique of Chinese national character. A recurring theme in the critique was the idea that the Chinese people were incapable of love and sympathy. This was considered a fatal flaw because the nation was thought to be first and foremost an affective community, sustained, and renewed by the strength of individual patriotic sentiments. The members of a modern nation must be able to love one another as co-nationals and properly enact that love, which meant, at the most basic level, to 2 See her article “Zhishifenzi (Chinese intellectuals) and Power.” 12 Concentric 33.2 September 2007 allow young men and women to love and marry without parochial considerations of social status or genealogy, and at a higher level, to be pained by the sufferings of one’s compatriots and to strive for their emancipation. May Fourth intellectuals were profoundly troubled by the Chinese populace’s apparent nonvaluation of emotion and indifference to the dire strait of the nation. As they cast their anxious gaze on rural towns and villages, they found that the disregard for young people’s feelings in matrimonial affairs went hand in hand with the lack of national sympathy.3 But if the Chinese heart was indeed so arid, what hope was there for the people to coalesce into a community of sympathy and attain modern nationhood? Under the influence of Romantic thought introduced from Europe and Japan, intellectuals began to formulate a concept of the folk in an effort to recuperate a deep reservoir of emotions beneath the stultifying trappings of Confucianism. The May Fourth folklore movement invented a new image of the Chinese folk that was timeless and fully endowed with the requisite emotions of modern life.4 Fiction writers, too, mined their childhood memories and began to paint rural society in a pastoral light. These writers came to form the “native soil school” (鄉土派 xiangtu pai). In this paper, I read closely the writings of three native soil authors: Yang Zhensheng, Fei Ming, and Shen Congwen. I aim to show how the representations of the folk and the native soil are intimately bound up with the production of the modern individual as an affective moral agent and of the nation as a community of sympathy. Nora Goes to the People Almost every prominent writer of the May Fourth era seems to have written homecoming narratives, whether or not he/she is known as a native soil writer. It should surprise no one that the common genealogy of native soil literature locates its fountainhead in Lu Xun (1881-1936), who dealt with the “different facets of his hometown complex” (Wang 249) in at least three stories: “My Old Home” (故鄉 Guxiang), “The New Year’s Sacrifice” (祝福 Zhufu), and “In the Tavern” (在酒樓 上 Zai juilou shang). He was also one of the earliest critics to “attempt to circumscribe the themes and structures of native soil literature” (Wang 249). Lu’s narrative of homecoming tends to dwell on the journey itself or the moment of 3 For an extended discussion of the connection between nationalism and the cult of emotion, see Lee, Revolution of the Heart. 4 For details, see Lee, “Tears That Crumbled the Great Wall.” Lee 13 The Other Chinese encounter so that it is as much about the narrator’s crisis of identity or conscience as about home or homeland per se.
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