Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity (Ideas, History, and Modern China)

Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity

Ideas, History, and Modern China Edited by

Ban Wang, Stanford University Wang Hui, Tsinghua University Geremie Barmé, Australian National University

VOLUME 1

Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity by

Peter Button

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Button, Peter, 1960– Configurations of the real in Chinese literary and aesthetic modernity / by Peter Button. p. cm. — (Ideas, history, and modern China ; 1) Summary: “Tracing the formation of the modern concept of literature in 20th century China, this book examines the emergence of the Chinese socialist realist novel in relation to the literary and philosophical currents globalized in the wake of capitalist modernity”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-90-04-17095-7 (alk. paper) 1. Chinese fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Socialist realism in literature. I. Title. PL2442.B88 2009 895.1’3520912–dc22 2008048769

ISSN 1875-9394 ISBN 978 90 04 17095 7 © Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

To Vera, Max, and Margo

CONTENTS Preface .......................................................................................... Acknowledgements ......................................................................

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Introduction ............................................................................... National Character, Exemplarity, and World Literature ........ Figuring a Literary Humanity in (and through) Theory ................................................................................. Aesthetics and the Institution of Modern Chinese Literature ............................................................................. The Location(s) of Theory in Modern Chinese Literary Studies .................................................................................. The Two (post-) Metaphysical Trajectories in the Formation of Modern Chinese Literature: Toward a Clear Definition of “Man” .............................................................................

1 1

Chapter One The Trials of Chinese Literary Realism ........... The In(ter)vention of Chinese Modernism ............................ The Political Unconscious of the “Limits of Realism” ......... The Stillbirth of Chinese Literary Realism ............................ Totalization and Violence in Lu Xun’s “Master Discourse of Realism” ..........................................................................

7 13 19 31 41 45 51 54 60

Chapter Two Lu Xun’s Ah Q as “Gruesome Hybrid” ............ 85 Lu Xun, Zarathustra, and the Type (dianxing) ........................ 87 Ah Q , Ressentiment and Typology ............................................ 98 The Biographer’s (and Our) Ah Q and Arthur Smith’s Character/Soul/Bild-less Chinese ....................................... 105 Chapter Three The Aesthetic Critique of Modernity in Chinese Marxism, New Criticism, and Adorno ..................... C. T. Hsia, Human Evil, and the “Living Image of Man” ... Marxist and Southern Agrarian Criticism on the Cultural Predations of Positivism ...................................................... Concrete Universality and the Critique of Aesthetic Modernity in Cai Yi and John Crowe Ransom ................. Cai Yi, Adorno, and Aesthetic Universality ...........................

119 119 128 141 149

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Chapter Four Global/Modern Figurations of the Type in Cai Yi, Heidegger, and Whitman ......................................... The Heideggerian Type, Alfred Rosenberg’s “Race Form,” and (para-)Humanity ........................................................... Cai Yi and the Dialectical Materialist Artistic Type .............. Cai Yi’s Typical Humanity and Walt Whitman’s Literary Eidaesthetics of the Nation ................................................. Chapter Five Aesthetics and Desire in Yang Mo’s Song of Youth ............................................................................................ The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Revolutionary Bildungsroman ......................................................................... Ero(poli)tics of the Text ........................................................... Image, Knowledge, and Revolutionary Formation (Bildung) ................................................................................. Conclusion ............................................................................... Conclusion Exemplarity in Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s Hongyan: From White Terror to “Red Classic” ....................... Revisioning the History of Hongyan ........................................ Revolutionary Insurrection and Universality .......................... The Aporia of Modern Chinese Revolutionary Subjectivity ........................................................................... Conclusion ...............................................................................

161 166 176 186 201 201 212 223 231 235 239 247 265 272

Glossary of Chinese Terms ......................................................... 281 Bibliography ................................................................................. 289 Index ............................................................................................ 301

PREFACE This book is premised on the conviction that the effort to provide a more comprehensive account of Chinese socialist realist literature can help shed light on a series of important problems and issues in the study of modern Chinese literature. It is well known that until recently socialist realist literature in China had endured the most prolonged critical neglect. My purpose was not, however, to restore this literature to the former preeminent status it once held in China or to simply fill in a significant gap in our understanding 20th-century Chinese literary history. Rather, what has always been compelling for me about this literature is that it seemed to have taken on all the cultural, aesthetic, political and philosophical burdens of literary modernity as a whole. It was therefore not difficult to discover in it some of the most important concerns that have animated not only the discipline of modern Chinese literature, but the modern institution of literary study itself. In writing this book, I was therefore guided above all by a desire to let the gradual formation of socialist realist literature in twentiethcentury China speak to the larger problem of how aesthetic ideology has shaped both the modern humanities (in China and the West), as well as, more locally, our own institutional practices as scholars and teachers of literature. If the connections between “red classic” novels like Yang Mo’s Song of Youth and Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s Red Crag and humanities pedagogy in the North American academy may initially appear obscure, it is largely because of the way we have tended to understand socialist literature in China. Those connections become clearer when we view them from the broader historical perspective of the modern concept of literature—a term whose apparent, straightforward innocence is belied by the extraordinarily complex and tumultuous history that marks the emergence of the institution of modern Chinese literature. My reliance upon the idea of a specifically modern concept of literature entails certain consequences for both the disciplinary scope of this study and its form. I draw upon the work of a variety of scholars of different theoretical persuasions who share the insight that to speak of literature in its modern sense is to invoke, in the same breath, an institutional arrangement within the humanities structured around the

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practices of literary theory, criticism and pedagogy. How this modern concept of literature as a tripartite relationship between philosophy, literature and criticism takes form in twentieth-century China and how it partially culminates in socialist realist literature is one of the guiding concerns of this book. My plan was not to write a theoretical work about modern Chinese literature, but rather to examine the reasons why theory itself plays so decisive a role in its emergence. As is very well known, the role of what we conventionally term literary theory in the study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature has been the subject of considerable controversy in the past. My interest in that controversy had much less to do with affirming the value of either literary theory as such or one theoretical approach in particular, though my own interests and allegiances will become clear enough in what follows. If I can claim no impartiality on the question of the role of theory, the reason why has much less to do with my own theoretical orientation than with the fact that a major task of this book is to explore the ineluctably theoretical problem of how modern Chinese literary realism emerges and develops in a decisive relationship to modern philosophy. That this becomes most vividly apparent in the Chinese socialist realist novel should not be taken to mean that modern Chinese realism’s earlier appearance was no less powerfully shaped by philosophical concerns, as I show in chapters one and two. Paramount among those concerns is the ultimately political question of the modern project of humanism, a major theme of this book. This particular problem and its specific articulation in 20th century China is most profitably examined via the work of writers like Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, who both individually and collectively, have offered some of the most sustained and penetrating analyses of not only the modern philosophical question of human being, but its direct connection to the modern concept of literature. This book addresses their work and the work of other scholars of modern literature whose own analyses are informed by the kind of patient, critical readings of modern literature’s complex relationship to philosophy that Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy and Jacques Derrida have conducted over the past forty-odd years. The importance I accord their work is mostly due to the fact that the work of each is heavily invested in a set of problems taken up with extraordinary creativity, intellectual rigor and sensitivity in 20th-century China. Indeed, Nancy’s enumeration of some of those problems: “History, Consciousness, the State or Value, Right, Force, Will, Work, Freedom,

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Art, Man,” could very well be said to constitute the core thematics to shape 20th century Chinese realist literature and literary criticism.1 Of course, what comprises the literary criticism of modern and contemporary Chinese literature extends well beyond China itself. It is very well apparent that the contemporary study of modern literature is informed by a host of theoretical resources derived in the most general sense from the two catch-alls of contemporary criticism—poststructuralism and postmodernism. A key premise of this book is that there is a decided mismatch between the way modern China and North America have assimilated modern theory. I argue in the introduction that as we consider the problem of the modern institution of literature in China we need to keep very much in mind that both poststructuralism and postmodernism derive fundamentally from extensive critical reflections on the very same philosophical texts that so powerfully shaped Chinese literature, aesthetics, philosophy and politics throughout the 20th century, namely, to speak in the broadest possible terms, the works of Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. The North American university presents a very different historical picture by virtue of the fact that beginning in the late 1940s continental philosophy all but disappeared from the philosophy curriculum. I argue that one crucial, if indirect, consequence of this fact is that the study of modern Chinese literature in the West was placed at an even greater remove from the critical concerns that continued to animate and sustain literature, literary criticism and theory in China. As such scholars as Liu Kang and Wang Ban have amply shown, the discourse of modern aesthetics facilitated the kind of philosophically charged inquiry into literature that one finds consistently in China beginning in the late 19th century. This difference helps in part to account for the two separate, if overlapping, historical itineraries of the study of modern Chinese literature, one in mainland China and the other in North America and Taiwan. My goal was not to further isolate the one from the other, much less to use the insights of either to highlight the failures of the other. Very much to the contrary, I wanted to show that what have tended to appear as the very obvious differences of critical sensibility and orientation 1 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Exhaustion of Signification,” in The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997), 43–45, 44.

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between, for example, Mao Dun and C. T. Hsia, obscure more profound connections between the two. This is especially so in terms of how for each, the essence of modern human being is figured in relationship to modern literature. Moreover, I do so precisely because those connections reveal the unique ways 20th-century China participates in what Nicholas Brown has termed the global “eidaesthetic itinerary” of the modern concept of literature. I examine Brown’s critical appropriation of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s term “eidaesthetics” in more detail in the chapters that follow, but suffice it here to say that it refers to the aesthetic presentation in literature of the philosophical idea of freedom as the modern subject’s identity. Brown’s forceful analysis of modernism and African literature provides us a way to properly situate modern China’s extensive theoretical investment in the literary and aesthetic problems of the image (xingxiang 形象) and the type (dianxing 典型). The latter term, especially, has often been noted in studies of modern Chinese literature. As will become apparent in the chapters that follow, I have sought to provide an understanding of such concepts in terms of their initial philosophical articulation in the work of Cai Yi. Just as importantly, however, I wanted as well to show how Cai Yi’s theoretical work itself is aligned with the much vaster program of modern “onto-typology” (a term I will later explain in detail) in literature. From this vantage, it becomes possible to make out a different set of critical constellations, such as the ones I propose in chapter three (C. T. Hsia, Cai Yi, Allen Tate, John Crow Ransom and Theodor Adorno) and chapter four (Martin Heidegger, Cai Yi and Walt Whitman). The key result of this type of inquiry is to underscore yet again the remarkably varied ways China engages literary and aesthetic modernity. On this count, it is essential to underscore the important historical fact that the social, political and economic conditions that led to the emergence of the modern concept of literature in the late-eighteenth century in the West arrive fitfully in China via capitalism’s global expansion. How this process actually occurs in China could never be adequately understood through some homogenizing template of “Western influence.” As Brown insists, “capitalism as a global economic system is also predicated on an uneven development that produces uncountable eddies and swirls in historical time, [and] the literally unthinkable complexity of contemporary history thwarts any overhasty universalizing gesture.”2 The complexity is abundantly apparent in the problem of 2 Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-century Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3.

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modern Chinese literature and this book should be understood as offering a preliminary effort to think the problem of Chinese socialist realist literature in relation to the idea of world literature that forms in the wake of the globalization of capitalism. Forbiddingly dense theoretical prose has been the subject of many complaints both within the field of modern Chinese literature and the discipline of literary scholarship as a whole. If the reader has any difficulty with the writing in this book, it will have primarily to do with my desire to introduce into the discussion of the institution of modern Chinese literature a set of concerns and issues that may not be immediately familiar. I have tried very hard to ensure that I explain as carefully as I can all of the terms and concepts I bring to bear in the analysis. At the very least, I have provided the reader in footnotes a clear indication of which texts they might consult for a fuller understanding of those terms. Furthermore, when examining theoretical concerns, I have adopted a strategy of revisiting central conceptual problems in different contexts and from different angles. By doing so, my hope has been to give the reader a better sense of the significance of those issues. Nonetheless, I cannot emphasize enough that what is theoretical in my analysis is guided for the most part by the problems the Chinese writers and theorists themselves felt compelled to engage, whether or not those problems are explicitly formulated as such. My aim, therefore, has not been to produce intellectual biographies of the figures whose work I examine. Instead, I have tried to analyze their work in relation to the complex weave of literature, philosophy, and criticism that forms Chinese literary and aesthetic modernity and whose global horizons extend directly to our own practices as scholars in the humanities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book bears the marks of countless conversations with many different people begun long before I started writing it. As I grew busier with the tasks of teaching, writing this book and raising two wonderful children with my partner Vera, too often those earlier exchanges suffered neglect. They nonetheless long continued to sustain my progress with this work. Jon Solomon, Rich Calichman, Mark Anderson, Naoki Sakai and Chris Lupke are among those neglected interlocutors who have helped to shape this work in many decisive ways. I am grateful to Li Yang who first stimulated my interest in the problem of Chinese socialist realism and to Huang Yibing, Han Yuhai and Professor Xie Mian for an extraordinary year spent at Beijing University as a graduate student. I am also enormously grateful to my colleagues at McGill, Ken Dean, Thomas LaMarre, Grace Fong and Robin Yates for all their consistent support. I would like also to thank Wang Ban for his interest in this project and the support he so generously offered me as I completed it. I am indebted to Matt Kawecki at Brill for all his warm encouragement and assistance, so often requested on very short notice. I am also very grateful to two anonymous readers whose comments were essential to my revision of the manuscript. Jeff Jacks’s careful editing of the manuscript did much to improve it. Major portions of Chapter 4 were originally published in Postcolonial Studies, Volume 9, Number 4 in December 2006, under the title “(Para-)humanity, Yellow Peril and the postcolonial (arche-)type.” Used by permission of the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group. Chapter 5 original appeared as “Aesthetics, Dialectics and Desire in Yang Mo’s Song of Youth,” in Positions, Vol. 14, number 1. Copyright 2006, Duke University Press, all rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher. Eliza Button, Adam Button and Larry Schlang gave me all the love and support a brother and brother-in-law could ever ask for. Finally, I owe much more to Vera Pohland, Max and Margo Button than I will ever be able to express. No measure exists for what each one of them has given me. I dedicate this book to them.

INTRODUCTION National Character, Exemplarity, and World Literature For all that has ever been written on the subject of China’s early 20th century complex embrace of the modern discourse of national character, the question of how and why the very definition of “truly creative art” in the May Fourth era would have so much invested in that discourse remains, as yet, unanswered.1 It hardly helps matters that the very concept of national character assaults our contemporary critical sensibility as a particularly troubling relic of 19th century European colonial ideology, having enabled virulent assertions of the colonizer’s moral superiority and, in the same stroke, relegating the colonized to the condition of moral abjection. In the case of modern China, we are further compromised by the clear recognition that one of its most broadly revered intellectual figures, Lu Xun 鲁迅, took to his grave a faith that a critical reflection on and transformation of China’s own guominxing ࿖᳃ᕈ was as vital to a brighter Chinese future as a proletarian revolution.2 The well-known history of Arthur K. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics and its circulation in China from the late-19th century on seems as well an especially inhospitable terrain upon which to determine precisely what “truly creative art” was meant to be and what May Fourth era writers and critics meant by so reverential an epithet.3 Even before the publication of Lu Xun’s “True Story of Ah

1 Mao Dun ⨆⋫, “Da Yun Ming xian sheng 答允明先生,” Xiaoshuo yuebao (ዊ说月报) 13, no. 13 (Oct. 13, 1922): 3. 2 Lydia Liu quotes Lu Xun: “I still have hopes that someone will eventually start translating Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, because this book offers insights that would lead us to analyze, question, improve, and transform ourselves. Rather than clamoring for recognition and praise from others, we must struggle with ourselves and find out what it means to be Chinese.” Lu Xu Quanji 鲁迅全集 (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1991) 6: 623. Quoted in Lydia Liu. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity —China, 1900 –1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 53. 3 For a comprehensive discussion of the Chinese discourse of national character, especially as regards the Chinese and international reception of Lu Xun’s “True Story of Ah Q ,” see Paul B. Foster’s Ah Q Archeology: Lu Xun, Ah Q , Ah Q Progeny and National Charter Discourse in Twentieth-century China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006).

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Q” (㒙Q 正传), Mao Dun had also claimed modern Chinese literature’s successful encounter with the discourse of national character was to be the standard of true art according to which Chinese literature might be granted entry to “world literature.”4 What I would like to call attention to here is not the thematic import of national character for modern Chinese literature. Rather, what interests me is the problem of what I will term the rhetoric of exemplarity which haunts as much the discourse of national character as it does practically the whole of modern Chinese aesthetics itself. In his Phantom Formations, Marc Redfield speaks of the continuing need to explain the provenance, power, and instability of the aesthetic terminology—the language of type and stereotype, model and imitation, beauty and ugliness, prefiguration and exemplarity—that saturates the various discourses with which the post-Enlightenment Western cultures have construed themselves as historical narratives, which is to say as aesthetic narratives of racial, sexual, and class identities and differences.5

What Redfield claims here of modern “Western” cultures, it will be the task of this book to show obtains consistently throughout 20th century China. As I will show in the pages that follow, Mao Dun and Lu Xun’s interest in national character is fully inscribed within this logic of exemplarity. Precisely because this is the case, it is hardly surprising that Lu Xun would produce China’s first literary type (wenxue dianxing ᢥቇౖဳ). Even more germane to the argument of this book, which seeks to understand the formation of the modern concept of literature, Lu Xun was likewise the first to deploy the term dianxing ౖဳ in what can best be described as its literary critical sense. Mao Dun’s statement above also affirms prospectively the terms of a canon-in-emergence of modern Chinese literature, comprised of works whose canonical status determines their potential for inclusion in the larger canon of world literature. The exemplary nature of a modern Chinese literature of national character serves as the principle that decides participation in such a cosmopolitan literary order. Nicholas Brown in his Utopian Generations notes two crucial references to the concept of world literature, each of which speaks directly to the links between our modern concept of literature and an emerging global

4 Mao Dun, Mao Dun Wenyi zalunji, shangji ⨆⋫ᢥ艺杂论集, 上集 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1981), 21. 5 Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), x.

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modernity impelled by the movement of capital.6 The first of these references comes from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who is credited with having coined the concept Weltliteratur; and the second from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto, in which, Brown notes, literature puts in a “surprise appearance.” In his conversations with Johann Peter Eckerman in 1827, Goethe urges that “National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of world literature is at hand and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.”7 Marx and Engels situate Goethe’s Weltliteratur in relation to capital: The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of the Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. . . . And as in material, so in intellectual production. . . . [F]rom the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.8

Brown underscores just how fully Goethe’s prediction of a world literature has been realized for us in the form of contemporary multiculturalism, while at the same time insisting that “it is just as clear that the Marxian narrative, where particular cultural forms colonize territory along with economic ones, represents the truth of Goethe’s metaphor.”9 Exactly forty years separates Mao Dun’s initial articulation of the principles that would guide the formation of the modern Chinese literary canon from the publication of C. T. Hsia’s retrospective establishment of his own canon. Hsia’s History of Modern Chinese Fiction (hereafter 6 Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth Century Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5–6. 7 Quoted in David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1. 8 Quoted in Brown, Utopian Generations, 6. I would note as well Brown’s guiding conviction that the concept of totality be taken seriously in examining the relationship between the global movement of capital and the formation of modern literature. “What the concept of totality gives us is, paradoxically, access to the radical incompleteness of what appears spontaneously as solid and whole. Complete, self-evident things (say a commodity, a democracy, a novel) are in fact incomplete and always derive their being from something else (the production cycle, the world economy, the concept and institution of literature). . . . [ T]he refusal to take account of these larger processes gives the phenomenon its innocence and in do so utterly deforms it” (10–11). 9 Brown, Utopian Generations, 6.

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History) would be based just as surely on a precise sense of what true art could be. For both Mao Dun and then later Hsia, this canon derives its significance from the aspirations toward the universality Weltliteratur affirms. Of course, Mao Dun and C. T. Hsia are not only at opposite ends of this four-decade temporal spectrum, since the political gulf that separates the leftist Chinese writer and critic from the anti-communist and Yale-educated New Critic is familiar to every student of modern Chinese literature. As surely as Mao Dun’s leftist literary activism would include the vocations of novelist and literary critic alongside those of propagandist, political activist and cultural minister, Hsia’s New Critical convictions meant that he would necessarily abhor any instrumentalist literary practice as much as he would disdain all those other activities into which Mao Dun’s conception of art and the role of the artist would lead him. And yet the politics of the problem has a way of obscuring other equally important differences between the two. Those differences, which are the function of radically distinct literary critical genealogies, are one of the main subjects of this book. The principles of Mao Dun’s protocanon are so far removed from those that govern C. T. Hsia’s own (now canonical) canon that they are barely registered in the latter’s work. The bulk of my attention in this book will thus be devoted to piecing together the complex critical and literary trajectory of which Mao Dun himself is a part, while at the same time examining some of the most decisive reasons Hsia’s work remains so distant from the former. I have noted that what both Mao Dun and C. T. Hsia share is the conviction that the modern Chinese writer’s task is the creation of true art. We could remain content to let this otherwise unremarkable fact be explained by virtue of either a different set of literary critical standards of excellence or varying degrees of cultivated aesthetic sensibility.10

We can hardly remain oblivious to the inevitable bias toward Hsia as the one who honed his critical tastes first in English literature and under the tutelage of one of New Criticism’s most important institutional figures, Cleanth Brooks at the elite, first-world institution, Yale University. Despite the obvious political divisions that have governed this history of the institution of modern Chinese literature, and the fact that the Cold War produced two almost entirely separate fields of modern Chinese literary studies, if we conceive of the field as a whole, beginning not with C. T. Hsia but with figures such as Mao Dun, then we must address the problem of what Etienne Balibar terms intellectual difference (Etienne Balibar, “Man and Citizen: Who’s Who?” The Journal of Political Philosophy 2, no. 2 [1994]: 94–114). By this, I mean only that the theoretical and political nature of New Criticism aside, Hsia’s access to a first-world university should be seen as highly relevant to the geopolitical and institutional reception of his 10

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As will become apparent below, my interest lies less in pitting one set of critical claims against the other, than with assessing each in terms of what they tell us about what I will refer to as the assimilation and formation of the modern concept of literature in 20th century China. But it is likewise the case that Mao Dun’s determination of a modern literature of national character as the sole road to the true art and the promise of entry into the ranks of a properly world literature would later find its negative corollary in C. T. Hsia’s notion of the Chinese writer’s central failing, namely, her/his “obsession with China.”11 My interest lies in providing a more comprehensive account of what Mao Dun’s claim signifies both in terms of his immediate cultural milieu of the May Fourth period and what it explains of China’s engagement with modern literature in the 20th century. Lu Xun, I argue in the first chapter, is a vital point of departure for my analysis in this regard, not only because his novella “The True Story of Ah Q” takes seriously the problem of national character as a problem of modern Chinese literature. On this count, few critics have made a more important contribution to our understanding of Lu Xun’s engagement with Arthur K. Smith’s book than Lydia Liu. Her deft analysis of the problem should have permanently dispelled any remnant conviction that the “True Story of Ah Q” emerged as the product of Lu Xun’s wholly uncritical encounter with the American missionary’s vision of China and “the” Chinese. I will have occasion to examine Liu’s superb reading of Lu Xun, Smith and Ah Q in chapter two. But the 2003 republication of Chinese Characteristics, as well as Liu’s own introduction to that edition also testifies to what will likewise remain a central premise of all that follows, namely that the actual import of the discourse Smith’s book

work. This applies as much to the republication of his History in 1999 and its translation and dissemination in mainland China in the 1980s as it would to both Balibar’s analysis and the current work. For a probing analysis of Liu Xiaobo and hierarchies of intellectual difference both within China and in China’s relation to the West, see Jon Solomon, “The Sovereign Police and Knowledgeable Bodies: Liu Xiaobo’s Exilic Critique of Politics and Knowledge,” positions: east asia cultures critique 10, no. 2 (2002): 399–429. 11 By the same token, David Wang is correct to note that Frederic Jameson’s concept of national allegory corresponds to some degree with Hsia’s notion of a “Chinaobsession.” But if anything is uncanny about such a relationship, it is simply that Jameson was able to intuit with remarkable precision precisely what Mao Dun claims without Hsia’s obvious advantage of knowledge about the history of modern Chinese literature. See Wang’s introduction to C. T. Hsia, History of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), vii–xxxvi, xxiii.

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figures in so exemplary a manner for Lu Xun and so many that followed him continues to remain cloaked in obscurity. Such obscurity has rendered it all the more difficult for us to properly conceive how what was understood as the modern fate of true art in China could have first found itself so tightly bound to the stakes of national character discourse. That this peculiar conjugation of national character and art that preoccupied the critical work of figures such as Mao Dun seems to so thoroughly misconstrue all we take art to be is perhaps symptomatic of a larger blind spot we (post-)post-moderns share about how the modern conception of literature emerged in China. Indeed, the link between true literature and a guominxing seems to us now almost as far-fetched as Xu Shoushang’s 许寿裳 claim in 1945 that all of Lu Xun’s “six million words” were addressed solely to the problem of China’s national character.12 My purpose here will be less to reaffirm this connection between literature and national character than to carefully examine the discursive conditions that enabled such claims, especially since there is ample evidence that those conditions remain very much our own as scholars of literature.13 Further, I will argue that both claims capture something fundamentally true about both modern literature and Lu Xun’s specific literary and critical practice. But if this is the case, it is also because much of the literature and criticism from May Fourth on that would broadly come under the heading of realism (and then socialist realism) was itself the product of a process of making ever more explicit what I will show was implicit, though powerfully so, in the work of Lu Xun. What inhabits his “True Story of Ah Q” as a possibility regarding the modern concept of literature will take several decades before it is rendered fully explicit.

12 Quoted in Paul Foster, Ah Q Archeology, 92. Foster quite understandably finds such a view an exaggeration. He is certainly correct as well that Xu was participating in a “discourse of legitimization of Lu Xun as a national hero and intellectual (175).” 13 Rey Chow is no doubt largely correct that “apart from the convention of Hegelian intellectual history, New Criticism is arguably still the predominant mode of analysis in modern Chinese literary studies today.” While I am broadly in agreement with this claim, the conditions I refer to are those that govern the formation of the institution of modern literary studies, as such. I discuss this in more detail below. Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, ed. Rey Chow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 24.

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Figuring a Literary Humanity in (and through) Theory It is vital as well to make clear at the outset that a guiding interest in the notion of “true art” in modern Chinese criticism must be carefully distinguished from an exercise in personal literary taste. The task I set for myself most certainly does not include what would likely be a futile effort to install (or restore) the modern canon of socialist realist classics to their presumably rightful seat of literary honor alongside Water Margin, Journey to the West, and Dream of the Red Chamber. After all, the reason why no literary work’s stature will ever be secure has less to do with the impossible vagaries of literary tastes and canonical fashions centuries hence, though that is obvious enough. Rather, it has far more to do with the fact that the very (modern) concept of literature which serves to organize those critical tastes is no less immune to the corrosive action of historicity. A comparison between the modern figure of “man” as genealogically isolated by Michel Foucault in the Order of Things and our modern conception of literature is by no means arbitrary, for as we shall see in what follows, the one is inconceivable without the other.14 In much of what follows I will seek to underscore the fact that not only is it generally (indeed, globally) the case that there is an intimate and precise connection between the modern determination of literature and the modern figure of the human, but also that specifically in the case of modern China this connection is abundantly manifest in the gradual emergence of socialist realist literary and aesthetic theory. That it is especially apparent in this particular “period” of modern Chinese literature may help us account for why this connection is so little remarked. After all, socialist realist literature—to say nothing of the theoretical work composed by such figures as Cai Yi ⬰仪—an analysis of whose work on aesthetics I examine in later chapters—has received the least critical attention of probably all phases of modern Chinese literature.15 It is likewise the form of modern Chinese literature 14 I refer to Foucault’s well-known remark “man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 387. 15 The “period” I am referring to is the one in which the majority of the “Red Classics” were written, namely what Kirk Denton’s excellent resource on modern Chinese literature and culture labels “1950s–1960s,” or more precisely, 1948 to 1965. As Denton’s invaluable bibliography affirms, this particular period has received the least critical attention of all the periods in modern Chinese literature. MCLC Resource

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that weathered the longest critical embargo due perhaps most of all to the Cold War and its impact upon the formation of modern Chinese literary studies in North America. My purpose is not, however, to extend the containment of socialist realism as a distinct Chinese literary historical period into the present in a merely more contemporary critical idiom. Quite the contrary, as will become clear in much of what follows, if Chinese socialist realism realizes a form of literary modernity in an especially consequent and trenchant manner, its predominant features are practically everywhere in evidence throughout the course of modern (and contemporary) Chinese literature, if in less compulsively self-reflexive forms. Moreover, socialist realist literature and theory offer in exemplary fashion the very image of our own predicament as scholars of Asian literatures, especially when we are beset with anxieties about the limits of (Western) theory when it comes to a critical analysis of modern (Asian) literary texts. If I offer no prescriptions—and just as surely no proscriptions—on the role of “theory” in the study of Chinese literature it is simply because, as I will show, what we call contemporary theory—from all varieties of “poststructuralism,” “psychoanalytic feminist criticism,” and of course, all manner of “(post-)Marxist criticism” was present, albeit in implicit form, in modern Chinese criticism and theory from its very beginnings. The current work is guided in part by the conviction that there is nothing remarkably “foreign,” “Western,” and hence “extraneous” to contemporary literary theory when it comes to 20th century Chinese literature and criticism. Thus, much of what constitutes the theoretical armature of socialist realism makes it almost impossible to delimit the phenomenon historically to the post-liberation period and requires us to look much further afield in both historical time and geographical space if we are to begin mapping its contours properly. Given modern China’s well-known (and, no doubt for many, still notorious) embrace of a decidedly German philosophical idiom (Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche) since as early as Wang Guowei, one could quite plausibly argue that nothing of what would ultimately come to comprise poststructuralist thought—and by extension North American versions of literary theory derived from it—would have been utterly unfamiliar within much of Center, (Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center). http://mclc.osu .edu/rc/studbib.htm#F1.

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the 20th century Chinese intellectual milieu. When, for example, in chapter two I make critical use of Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy in my reading of “The True Story of Ah Q ,” it is in part because not only would we be justified in asserting that Lu Xun would have found Deleuze’s remarkable study of Nietzsche particularly hospitable to his own critical interests and values, but also Lu Xun would have had little difficulty grasping much of what was at stake in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche. It is significant that to precisely the degree that the same could well be said of Mao Dun as well, in 1921, it is just as likely that Hsia would have found nothing of this sort of critical affinity in Deleuze. And this most of all because Deleuze affirms categorically what Hsia’s critical approach could never have countenanced.16 Admittedly, there is no way to prove that Deleuze’s book would have been received in this way by Lu Xun, Mao Dun, or Hsia. But at least pondering such a probability allows us to consider what might be gained by posing certain modern and contemporary theoretical texts in a relation to the Chinese texts I examine and do so in a manner that works to explore their deeper affinities. As much as possible, I would like to show that in the cases I examine below the anxieties that are provoked by what is deemed the instrumental imposition of “contemporary Western theory” on the modern Chinese literary text are the inevitable product of a simple failure to grasp just how fully two such texts—both the “Western” one and the “Chinese” one—are animated by the very same modern problematics. Indeed, by working toward a better understanding of what is truly at stake in his work, I ask whether this applies just as much to the case of the New Criticism of C. T. Hsia. I will take up this problem in chapter four in which I show that, remarkably, New Criticism shares a critical ethos with the work of no less a party Marxist theorist than Cai Yi. But the intention to conceive of the relations between the different texts as grounded first and foremost in the discourses of modernity and hence as a relation between simply

16 “Firstly, art is the opposite of a ‘disinterested’ operation.” As we will see below, this single feature of what Gilles Deleuze recovers from Nietzsche strikes at the (Kantian) heart of the New Critical canon. But that is only one feature of what Deleuze affirms and what we have good reason to imagine Lu Xun in his own encounter with Nietzsche realized as well. Hsia would have been just as little inclined to admit the following series of equations into his critical apparatus. In Nietzsche, “we the artists” = “we the seekers of truth” = “we the inventors of new possibilities of life” (Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 103).

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modern texts means also that some contemporary theoretical works are far better suited to sustaining such a dialogue with the particular texts which in the case of the present work, happen to be written by Chinese writers or theorists.17 Despite the preoccupation with China and the Chinese that so clearly animates the latter texts, what is of decisive importance is less the cultural difference and far more the shared temporal location of the more recent critical work and the Chinese texts. Privileging first the sheer modernity of all of these texts as an ensemble does not mean bracketing as irrelevant the central concern for China in the Chinese ones, since even such widely divergent political and critical points of view as Mao Dun’s and C. T. Hsia’s agree that much of modern Chinese literature takes China as its predominant thematic focus. However, while for C. T. Hsia this represents modern Chinese literature’s most important failing, my interest lies in contributing to a deeper understanding of what makes the China-preoccupation of China’s writers exemplary of the vocation of modern literature. In doing so, we may also find our way clear to explaining not simply what is missing in Hsia’s account, but more productively what we might term the ideological unsaid of his critical procedure by showing that its faith in what I will term his onto-theological (a term I will shortly explain) conception of literary art situates his History in relation to modern Chinese Marxist aesthetics in important ways. I have claimed above that what generally comprises “Western theory” forms itself out of a critical tradition of which China was an extremely active consumer and producer. It is, as Marx reminds us above, the “cosmopolitan character” of that production that we must keep well in mind. By the very same token, save for a few exceptions, it was for both political and institutional reasons that post-war North American East Asian Area Studies in general and modern Chinese literature in

17 Of course, the discourses of modernity are multiple and lack both uniformity of content and a unified telos. I pluralize Jürgen Habermas’s term and the title of his book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Thomas Lamarre cautions against too facile an opposition between a single modernity and multiple modernities. “[I]t may no longer be enough to say that ‘modernity is not one but multiple’ but rather ‘modernity is one and multiple.’ But then this may be to think the world beyond modernity, and that transformative rather than the new.” See Lamarre’s introduction to Impacts of Modernities, ed. Lamarre and Kang Nae-hui (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; London: Eurospan, 2004), 34.

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particular was at the furthest critical remove from the multiple, complex claims of poststructuralist thought.18 That modern continental philosophy began to be translated and discussed in the late 19th century in China is now very well documented. That process has continued literally unabated since then. Yet few discussions of the role of “theory” in China studies ever pause to consider the very profound and lasting impact the Cold War absence of continental thought in the North American academy after the Second World War had not only upon North American sinologists, but also perhaps more importantly, on their relation to what they took to be their object of study. In short, modern philosophical thought remained very much part of the textual warp and woof of the broader modern Chinese intellectual milieu in a way that especially a postwar American sinologist was for institutional reasons least well equipped to recognize. There is thus no small irony in the fact that one place in the North American academy where several key elements of continental philosophy remained was in fact New Criticism itself, though in a form cloaked most of all for readers of Hsia’s History.19 In other words, New Criticism itself participates fully in what Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have carefully analyzed under the rubric of what they term the “romantico-modern concept of literature,” through its conscious and unconscious appropriation of philosophical categories taken, in this case, from Kant and Hegel.20

John McCumber’s 2001 book Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), details what he describes as the role of McCarthyism in the effective banishment of continental philosophy from American universities in the postwar period. While some have questioned the causal relation McCumber asserts between McCarthyism and the rise of analytical philosophy, none dispute the fact that the late forties in the United States signaled an embargo on modern (European) philosophy in the American academy. For a critical review of McCumber’s book, see Richard Hudelson and Robert Evans, “McCarthyism and Philosophy in the United States,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33 (2003): 242–260, 242. 19 This is also to say that I strongly suspect that Hsia was well aware of the degree to which leading figures in New Criticism owed much to Kant and Hegel. If he felt no scholarly compunction to address this connection, it was largely because the ontotheological reading of the Chinese writer’s (absent) relation to “Original Sin” was quite enough metaphysics. I examine this problem in detail below. Hsia Chih-tsing. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, intro. by David D. W. Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 20 I take this subject up in chapter three. For the time being we can make an initial foray into the general problem of modern literature’s relationship to philosophy via Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester’s introduction to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean Luc-Nancy’s important study of German romanticism, The Literary Absolute: “Thus 18

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One of the guiding aspirations of this book is to show that the failure to provide an adequate critical account of Chinese socialist realism’s emergence during the last half century is very much a consequence of the vast gulf that separates the intellectual orientations of China and North America, most especially in the post-war period. But I would argue as well, the anxieties regarding the role of “theory” in the study of modern Chinese literature follow the logic of Sigmund Freud’s uncanny as the return of the repressed. This has less to do with a simple North American Cold War ideological hostility toward Marxism. Rather, what I am attempting to describe is the institutionally enforced oblivion in North America of nearly all the theoretical resources that had long animated the critical scene in China since the beginning of the century, but with particular intensity after 1949. More importantly, those resources were in no way confined to Marx-Engels and Lenin.21 For the most part, the only exception to this was that element of North American China studies that sought to take seriously Marxism and even Maoism, rather than understand both as mere ideological mechanisms for totalitarian domination.22

one of the notable virtues of The Literary Absolute is that it raises and insists on the question of literature as such. As the authors’ analyses show, literature as it is most often understood, i.e., the romantico-modern concept of literature, literature as the object of a duly legitimated and institutionalized discipline, is thoroughly determined as a response to a certain philosophical ‘crisis’” (Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, “Translator’s Introduction: The Presentation of Romantic Literature,” in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester [Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1988], vii–xx, xiv). 21 Certainly the works of Marx-Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao remained the texts of primary importance. But as I have argued elsewhere, Chinese academic philosophy as early as 1949 clearly recognized the need to work carefully through Hegel’s works on logic in particular, in order to better grasp the nature of the dialectic. See Peter Button, “Negativity and Dialectical Materialism: Zhang Shiying’s Reading of Hegel’s Dialectical Logic,” Philosophy East and West, 57, no. 1 ( January 2007): 63–82. 22 This would include such works as Benjamin Schwartz’s Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), as well as Maurice Meisner’s Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). But it is equally important to add that by the late 1960s Western studies of China became far more hospitable to the claims of Asian Marxist thought. On this count, Nicholas Brown makes what may seem a remarkable claim. “But I would like to suggest that all theory is postcolonial theory: it owes its very existence to the struggle against colonial domination and its echo in the political urgency of the first world 1960s” (Brown, Utopian Generations, 24). Brown argues that “theory” (Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Fanon, etc.) emerges as a postwar response to colonialism. While North American philosophy remained almost completely insulated from the theoretical claims of Marxism and post-structuralism, Brown’s point helps us to

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Aesthetics and the Institution of Modern Chinese Literature A fundamental aim of this book is to explore the way Chinese socialist realism needs to be understood as the culmination of the decades-long process by means of which the central premises of this concept of literature are rendered more completely explicit. That socialist realism offers the most explicit development of that concept means also that this notion of literature is by no means its own. Very much to the contrary, it is present in the very institutional formation of modern (Chinese) literature as an object of study in both Chinese and Western institutions of higher learning. Marc Redfield has addressed this issue with remarkable clarity. One may thus claim in the abstract what the historical record confirms; not only is there no literature without criticism, but the history of the idea of literature is the history of its institutionalization. It may also be noted, however, that a contradiction highly productive of discourse labors at the institution’s heart. “Literature” is both infinitely populist and irreducibly elitist in its aspirations, and at once avant-gardist and archival in nature. . . . The critical endeavor, however, is as irreducible as it is conflicted, since it embodies the very self-consciousness of the “literary” text. Indeed, criticism has so thoroughly displaced philology in the twentieth-century academy partly because criticism’s appeal to the “opacity” and “inexhaustibility” of the literary text results in the full integration of the literary absolute as an institutional rationale.23

It is vital here at the outset to clarify precisely what is meant by the modern determination of literature, as I have referred to it above. To begin with, as is well known to students of comparative literature, the modern usage of the term literature as designating creative, imaginative works emerges only toward the late-18th century.24 What is crucial for our purposes is the broad consensus that the concept of literature

better understand and appreciate the pivotal role played by organizations such as the Concerned Asian Scholars in challenging the failure of postwar Asian studies to address the theoretical components of anti-colonial struggles around the globe. 23 Redfield, Phantom Formations, 45. 24 For a good discussion of the scholarship devoted to the emergence of the concept of literature, see Richard G. Terry’s Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660 –1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Among the works Terry discusses are Alvin B. Kernan, “The Idea of Literature.” New Literary History 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1973): 31–40, Douglas Lane Patey, “The Eighteenth Century Invents the Canon,” Modern Language Studies, 18, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 17–37, and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

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emerges in relation to the modern discourse of aesthetics. The connection between literature and aesthetics has been elaborated by a number of modern scholars, from René Wellek and Raymond Williams to Roland Barthes, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe.25 As Wellek phrases this relation, [t]o speak sweepingly one can say, summarizing, that in antiquity and in the Renaissance, literature or letters were understood to include all writing of quality with any pretense to permanence. The view that there is an art of literature, which includes both poetry and prose insofar as it is imaginative fiction, and excludes information or even rhetorical persuasion, didactic argumentation or historical narration, emerged only slowly in the eighteenth century. The discussion of taste, the rise of the virtuoso, the invention of the term aesthetic by Baumgarten in 1735—all this and much more led to Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), his treatise which gave clear formulas for distinguishing between the beautiful, the good, the true, and the useful. The slow rise in the prestige of the novel, long frowned upon as frivolous, collaborated in establishing a concept of literature parallel to the plastic arts and to music which is still with us today.26

For Raymond Williams, literature becomes marked out as a space of human creative imagination, decisively removed from the instrumentalized sphere of emerging industrial economy and the “socially repressive and intellectually mechanical forms of a new social order.”27 Terry Eagleton’s oft-quoted Ideology of the Aesthetics analyzes the importance of aesthetics in the formation of 18th-century middle class hegemony.28

25 We should note in passing the remarkably broad range of theoretical diversity represented by these figures, whom we can provisionally gloss under the headings Yale New Criticism, English cultural materialism, structuralist semiotics, and Derridean deconstruction. 26 René Wellek, “What is Literature?,” in What is Literature?, ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978), 16–23, 21. 27 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 7. 28 “If the aesthetic comes in the eighteenth century to assume the significance it does, it is because the word is shorthand for a whole project of hegemony, the massive introjection of abstract reason by the life of the senses. What matters is not in the first place art, but this process of refashioning the human subject from the inside, informing its subtlest affections and bodily responses with this law which is not a law. It would thus be as inconceivable for the subject to violate the injunctions of power as it would be to go find a putrid odour enchanting. The understanding knows well enough that we live in conformity with impersonal laws; but in the aesthetic it is as though we can forget about all that—as though it is we who freely fashion the laws to

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For our purposes, it is essential to recall just how consistently the discourse of modern aesthetics saturates Chinese critical discourse from the late 19th-century through to the “aesthetics fever” (meixuere ⟤ቇ热) in the 1980s. Even more remarkable, in the particular sphere of the aesthetic, the Cultural Revolution itself offers nothing of the kind of sudden and sustained hiatus in this process that characterized so many other endeavors. Indeed, one clearly senses in the best critical work on Chinese aesthetics the recognition that the Cultural Revolution itself merely amplified and radicalized many of the problems Chinese aesthetic discourse had been grappling with for nearly a century. As I will show in much of what follows, modern China offers an especially compelling example of the mutual imbrications of literature and aesthetics. More importantly, the relationship between these two discourses is figured in China specifically in terms of the legacy of post-romantic thought. What Wellek and Williams describe generally concerning our modern conception of literature, I will delineate in terms of what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have termed its “romanticomodern” variant—at once more precise than either Wellek or Williams and more generalized in the sense that it remains with us today. Their analysis of modern literature is formed with reference to early German romanticism. For the two analysts, “romanticism” does not signify simply a period or style of literature. Rather, the conceptual vocabulary that informs the installation of the modern concept of literature in China draws heavily upon 19th-century German philosophy. For contemporary scholars of comparative literature such as Nicholas Brown, the precise geographical location of the modern concept of literature‘s appearance is of far less importance than the historical fact that the concept was globalized in the wake of capitalism. In his Utopian Generations, Brown discusses the work of Paulin Houndtondji, the Benin philosopher and student of both Althusser and Derrida. Brown writes, Hountondji’s argument, however, refuses to remain at the level of culture, ultimately referring this movement to the total functioning of the “worldwide capitalist system” in which it is caught up and which determines the circulation of knowledge at every point. This step is absolutely

which we subject ourselves” (Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990], 42–43).

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introduction indispensable. For it cannot, then, simply be a matter of altering the circulation of knowledge without first taking account of that other thing that determines this circulation.29

For Brown, Hountondji offers the sort of materialist account of the global circulation of knowledge that renders the very notion of cultural imperialism via especially the so-called “West” deeply problematic. The conflation of capitalism with something called the “West” fails fundamentally to account for the systemic nature of the former. It is precisely for this reason that I will refer to the modern concept or determination of literature, rather than qualifying it as specifically Western in some essential sense. That May Fourth-era Chinese writers and critics would speak of “Western” literary criticism should not suggest that they were not primarily interested in what they perceived to be the modernity of that body of critical thought. Indeed, it was this generation of (post-)(semi-)colonial Chinese intellectuals that was most acutely sensitive to immediate cultural origins of Western literary criticism and philosophy. In short, it was only of secondary importance that so much of what would become the critical armature of modern Chinese literature often came with the descriptor “Western” attached. Had they needed only to negotiate their relationship to the West as a site of cultural origin, the scale of China’s immediate dilemma would have been vastly reduced. Instead, the pressing exigencies of capital’s globalization fundamentally transformed the conditions for China’s late-19th and early-20th century engagement of all elements of the project of modernity, including the formation of the modern concept of literature. Marc Redfield helps to align literature and aesthetics in a manner that speaks more directly to the way these two discourses would find fusion in 20th-century China. Redfield writes, Few narratives are more familiar to scholars of modern literature and culture than the story of the appearance of aesthetics, both as a new philosophical category and as a massively diffuse and influential discourse—one that provided the post-Romantic Western world with the meanings for words such as ‘culture’ and ‘art’ that we now consider primary. The topic of beauty is as old as philosophy itself, but the notion of the aesthetic as a particular sort of experience or judgment or class of objects does not begin to appear regularly until the eighteenth century. At the same time, large-scale historical developments were permitting, as is 29

Brown, Utopian Generations, 5.

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well known, the emergence of art and literature in their modern sense, and the transformation of the artist into a genius, the representative of universal humanity whose productions transcend the system of commodity exchange which enables them. Aesthetics partakes of the emergence of the universal subject of bourgeois ideology.30

What is essential to consider at this stage is the precise way in which the general features of the modern concept of literature and its connection to aesthetics are formed in Chinese critical discourse. As Redfield suggests, what features prominently in the modern relation between literature and aesthetics, is the fact that the latter is conceived largely in philosophical terms. In other words, the problem is no longer simply one of beauty, but of grasping the specific nature of the experience of beauty and judgments about it in a language that draws heavily from modern philosophy. It is not my intention to dispute the importance of English literature and literary criticism in this process in China.31 Rather, what is essential is simply sensitivity to the way the problem of literary realism in China becomes increasingly formulated in a critical language drawn from philosophy. But what is even more decisive is that the very notion of a specifically “romantico-modern” notion of literature is linked on the one hand to philosophy and criticism/theory on the other. As Brown insists in his own discussion of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s book The Literary Absolute, Literature here emerges as the middle term in a temporal and logical series, sandwiched between two apparently extraliterary discourses as it takes up philosophy on the one hand, and opens up the space for theory on the other.32

How and in precisely which ways this occurs in modern China will be the subject of the subsequent chapters. At this point, it is important to consider Brown’s use of italics since they are meant clearly to underscore that as regards the modern conception of literature, the relationship between the disciplines of philosophy, literature, and literary criticism is anything but extrinsic. Here, at least in this precise determination of

(Redfield, Phantom Formations, viii.) See Bonnie McDougall’s excellent inventory of the rich diversity of literary criticism in the May Fourth period, The Introduction of Western Literary Theories into Modern China, 1919–1925 (Tokyo: Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies, 1971). 32 Brown, Utopian Generations, 13. 30 31

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literature, an “organicity” governs the three.33 In the case of literature and theory, such a bond seems at least plausible, earlier protests against theory’s value in the study of Chinese literature notwithstanding. That such an organic connection would govern the discipline of philosophy’s relation to the other two may seem a good deal less likely, depending on one’s institutional, historical, and national position. For the purposes of what follows, my task is to show that such is genuinely the case with the gradual formation of modern Chinese socialist realism. That this image of the three disciplines may appear not only quite unfamiliar, but also intuitively suspect should come as little surprise. For if, as I will show below, this tripartite relationship not only characterized the post-liberation period in which socialist realism came very much into its own, but also is apparent as early as the late teens in China, albeit in quite different form, it is by no means the case that the institution of post-war North American Chinese (or for that matter East Asian) literary studies was prepared to recognize it as such. In fact, I believe this has more to do with the way C. T. Hsia’s History has been received, largely one must admit, because of the way his New Critical conception of the literary work of art appeared to abjure recourse to philosophical discourse of any sort. But as I noted above, I am reasonably certain that C. T. Hsia as a student of Cleanth Brooks was well aware of the way the very same elements of modern philosophy that so heavily informed the Chinese critical milieu were likewise drawn upon as a resource by New Criticism. Nonetheless, I doubt very much Hsia himself was as fully aware of the modern Chinese appropriation of philosophical aesthetics as he was of New Criticism’s. The manner in which modern Chinese literature itself will have occasion to “take up” philosophy and in doing so “open up” the space of criticism is especially marked in the case of socialist realism. My point here is only that there are institutional and historical reasons why the philosophy-literature-criticism triad has so rarely been addressed in the field of modern Chinese literature in North America.34

Brown, Utopian Generations, 14. For many of the same reasons, the critical vitality of the problem of modern aesthetics, as the field out of which this triad emerges, has often been most compellingly addressed by scholars who were educated in China and who did their graduate degrees in North America or Europe, often in comparative literature departments. 33

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The Location(s) of Theory in Modern Chinese Literary Studies In his introduction to Modern China’s collection of articles examining the status of “Theory” in Chinese literary studies, Perry Link provides an encapsulated history of the field. But beginning in the 1970s, and accelerating in the 1980s, the inadequacy of viewing literary texts only as historical source materials became ever more widely recognized . . . People who took the new positions [in the 1980s and 1990s] found themselves not in area studies centers but in language and literature departments, where disciplinary approaches were dominant. At the same time, in American academe as a whole, area studies were generally declining as all the disciplines, including those of the social sciences, were ascendant. Hence, in order to communicate with their colleagues in the literary discipline, scholars of modem Chinese literature began increasingly to read Western criticism and theory, as well as to approach the field of comparative literature.35

As Link’s description makes clear, the encounter with “Western criticism and theory” came late and only after an earlier encounter with actual “disciplinary approaches,” already in service in literature departments.36 While Link does not say precisely what those approaches might have been, it is important to keep in mind that almost nowhere in North American literature departments from the post-war period through to the present were literary texts treated as sources of simple historical knowledge. Indeed, from the Russian formalist criticism of the 1920s, to the rise and institutionalization of New Criticism from the 1930s, through to the early 1970s when “continental” phenomenological and hermeneutics approaches began slowly to take hold, to finally the emergence of what are generally termed poststructuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-Marxist criticism, in the late 1970s and 1980s, literary texts were rarely treated as simple sources of historical knowledge. What is consistent throughout post-war North American literary criticism is its anti-mimetic bias, a residue of New Criticism’s lasting

35 Perry Link, “Ideology and Theory in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature: An Introduction.” Modern China—Symposium: Ideology and Theory in the Study of Modern Chinese Literature, 19, no. 1 ( January, 1993): 4–12, 5. 36 Needless to say, if the study of English or European literatures were already disciplinarized, for reasons noted above, it was hardly the case that those departments welcomed the importation of what was for them continental European criticism, especially from France.

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and profound impact in North American literary studies. It is therefore not surprising that it would be the lingering effects of New Criticism’s cordoning off the literary work from any reference to the world that would inform the treatments of Chinese realism that I examine in detail in chapter one. Especially in the case of both Marston Anderson and David Wang, the largely oblique references to poststructuralist theory obscure the fact that their treatments of the emergence of realism in China with Lu Xun bespeak much more a New Critical conviction about the autotelic nature of the literary work. My concern will be less to question this approach than to suggest that the kind of snug fit that existed between T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound’s modernist poetics and the critical ethos of I. A. Richards is very hard to come by in the case of Anderson and Wang’s Lu Xun. Where Eliot’s own creative practice fully endorsed (and was fully endorsed by) the radically anti-realist bent of New Criticism, Lu Xun’s literary oeuvre, and so much of the modern Chinese literature that followed, militates very strongly against it. But what is crucial for our purposes is that when Michael Duke37 pens his lengthy defense of C. T. Hsia’s History against Liu Kang’s criticisms of the latter, he ends up misaligning him with the humanist strain of New Criticism with which Hsia was least sympathetic. This misalignment ironically succeeds in further underscoring precisely the critical distance that separates Liu Kang from Hsia that provoked Liu Kang’s critique in the first instance. In other words, Hsia’s far more profound critical affinities with the “Southern Agrarian” intellectual origins of New Criticism as a whole have served only to render the concept of modern literature’s formation in China all the more obscure, a problem I examine in detail in chapter three. Duke is by no means alone on this count, and one suspects it represents a pervasive view of C. T. Hsia. Indeed, one of Hsia’s keenest admirers, David Wang identifies Hsia with the “humanist tradition” shared by “T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Allen Tate and George Steiner.” Adding Tate to this list of “humanists” is a critical error for reasons I make clear in chapter three.38 As I will show, 37 Michael S. Duke, “Thoughts on Politics and Critical Paradigms in Modern Chinese Literature Studies,” Modern China. Paradigmatic Issues in Chinese Studies, II. 19, no. 1 ( January 1993): 41–70, 49. 38 Allen Tate and Hsia were temperamentally, philosophically and especially politically as distant from Irving Howe and Philip Rahv—and no doubt George Steiner as well—as was possible for New Critics to be from one another. Howe was a socialist

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the liberal, secular humanist strain of New Criticism associated with such figures as Irving Babbit, I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis is quite far removed from the form of New Criticism that powerfully informs Hsia’s History. The differences between these figures and Tate, Ransom, and Hsia, are not only substantial, but they are also of decisive importance for the overall argument of this book. My hope is that by subjecting Hsia’s method to a more precise genealogical analysis I will be able to shed further light on how the modern concept of literature formed in China. One essential element of this problem is alluded to in Duke’s essay in the following passage, whose ambivalence bears considerable postcolonial resonances. I quote Hsia at length from Duke’s article, including the latter’s bracketed retort to Liu Kang’s assertion that Hsia was “anti-modern.” In view of the cultural milieu of the modern Chinese writer; this was perhaps as it should be: until social justice, scientific and technological competence, and a measure of national strength were achieved, he had little choice but to serve his ideals. [So much for his being “adamantly opposed to modernization, industrialization, and technological progress.] In fact, his ideals came to him in the insidious shape of the Holy Ghost. Not merely in the literary context, the success of Communism was mainly due to its dazzling ability to identify itself with these ideals. It can be said categorically that, with two or three exceptions, no modern Chinese writer possessed enough compelling genius and imagination to carve his own path in defiance of the Zeitgeist; but the writers of talent and integrity, while espousing those ideals, also serve in their fashion, often reluctantly and in spite of themselves, the Holy Ghost. The work of these writers does not evince great imaginative power or technical brilliance; the intrusive presence of utilitarian ideals precluded the disinterested search for excellence; but it does have the quality of honesty, disturbing and illuminating enough in its depiction of the contemporary Chinese scene to deserve the attention of posterity [p. 499, emphasis added].39

Hsia’s legendary antipathy to the cause of Chinese communism can too easily obscure the degree to which his literary critical convictions are ones that he came by quite independently of his political views.

and in the sense I explore in detail in this book very much a “humanist.” But of Tate, Rahv wrote to Irving Howe, addressing him in mock Yiddish-inflected English, “Oiving, why don’t you smash . . . this Tate.” Quoted in Irving Howe: Socialist, Critic, Jew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 98. 39 Quoted in Duke, “Thoughts,” 49.

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For reasons that I will underscore below, Chinese communist writers were deficient by methodological default, simply by virtue of their engagé embrace of a mimetic role for literature. What Liu Kang deplores as Hsia’s “veritable canon of a non-leftist Chinese tradition of satirical and humanitarian realism” of course includes writers who suffer from the same deficiency, only considerably less so than their more avowedly socialist colleagues. Hsia’s New Critical standards of “disinterestedness,” absence of “intention,” refusal of “utilitarian ideals,” leave “Zhang Ailing 张爱玲, Zhang Tianyi 张天翼, Qian Zhongshu 钱钟书 and Shen Congwen ᴉ੼ᢥ,” with what amounts to a special token status that grants them, as Duke phrases it, “admission into the house of world literature” (Duke, “Thoughts,” 51). What especially the latter formulation indicates is the subtle, though no less apparent, necessary collusion between Hsia’s New Critical convictions and his status as (Western) world literature gatekeeper for Chinese literature. As the italicized opening line in the quote above reveals, Hsia very clearly recognized that what he terms China’s “cultural milieu,” (a symptomatically anodyne gloss for what was broadly and well understood by nearly every writer, thinker, and critic in China at the time as the twin modern historical emergencies of “semi-feudalism, semi-colonialism”) imposed demands upon Chinese writers that made it very unlikely any of them would ever fulfill the aesthetic criteria the North American New Critical establishment demanded of modern literary works. The reason was simply that those criteria were formed via a radical exclusion of precisely “modernization, industrialization, and technological progress” and especially any work of art, literary or otherwise, that posed the realization of any element of even one of those things as its raison d’etre. For any such instrumentalization of artistic practice could not have been more completely proscribed than in the work of figures such as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and, of course, Hsia’s mentor, Cleanth Brooks. The New Critical disdain for any artistic “utility” in one fell swoop excluded not only 20th-century Chinese literature, up to and including by Hsia’s own admission Zhang Ailing, but also nearly all of the extraordinary variety of postcolonial national literatures around the globe. Since its publication, readers of Hsia’s text have had to grapple with a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, Hsia offered by far the most knowledgeable, thorough, and sensitive readings of the broad scope of modern Chinese literature produced up until the time of its

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publication.40 On the other hand, his critical standards were clearly of such a nature that no Chinese writer ever managed to measure completely up to them. That Hsia never found what he went looking for in modern Chinese literature is beyond doubt, a fact admired by some for its disinterested, objective honesty and decried by others for its “Eurocentric” exclusion of modern Chinese writers from the ranks of world literature. This book will also consider whether Hsia necessarily had to overlook key features of what constituted modern Chinese literature as a complex whole. This was not simply because of his political differences with leftist writers, though politics surely played a part in this. For as I will show in chapter three, in the same stroke Hsia’s New Critical institutional training was brought to bear in the History, vital elements of it were just as surely disavowed in decisive ways. Suffice it here to say that this act of disavowal affects the whole of the History to the degree that Hsia was simply never able to fully grasp how his leftist counterparts conceived of literature. One suspects that Liu Kang objects not to Hsia’s “admiration” for Chinese “humanitarian realists” but to the fact that such a sentiment is largely moral rather than aesthetic. Hsia’s quote above seems for Duke to acknowledge the pressing necessity for China to engage in social, technological, and political modernization, but it is historically and institutionally naïve not to also recognize that the New Critical ethos was forged in direct opposition to all such values and the corrosive and diremptive effect they were deemed to have upon the “whole soul of man.”41 To whatever inevitable degree Hsia may have felt at a certain remove from New Criticism’s antipathy to “science,” his literary tastes were powerfully shaped by an equally strong rejection of a certain kind of modern humanism.42 Such sentiments are rife throughout Hsia’s History and have roots in the deeply conservative politics of New Criticism’s founders. I will explore the problem of the “soul” and the problem of “humanism” in more detail in chapter three. But I note for the time

Both the 1961 and 1970 editions. This was a basic tenet of New Critical faith, as numerous studies have shown, including Gerald Graff’s Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: Dee Publishers, 1995), 137. The quote is originally from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria who wrote that poetry “brings the whole soul of man into activity.” 42 As Graff phrases it: “The New Critics saw scientific objectivity as a symptom of that arrogant ‘humanism’ which trusted in the natural goodness of man and the inevitability of progress” (Graff, Literature against Itself, 131). 40 41

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being that Liu Kang’s judgment is amply supported by the historical record of New Criticism’s complex formation in North America and Hsia’s idiosyncratic appropriation of it in his work. As will become increasingly apparent, I am not simply arguing in favor of the use of theory, whatever its geographical or disciplinary origins, in Chinese studies. Rather, my point is that the role of theory was a given at the very outset of the emergence of modern Chinese literature, if in manifestly different form. Furthermore, it is hardly remarkable that even in those moments when the faculties of modern sinology objected most vociferously to the practice of theory in modern Chinese literary studies; they did so in terms which are no less indebted to the modern determination of literature than modern Chinese literature as a whole, including very much Chinese socialist realism. And yet I would go much further and argue that the remarkably wooden dual reification of “Western theory,” that can only teach us what “Western academics think” and “modern and contemporary Chinese literature” that teaches us what “modern and contemporary Chinese are” is, itself, eminently theoretical—even philosophical.43 I quote Michael Duke in full: Literature is no science. Literature is not a form of cumulative knowledge in which the older understanding or conception of something becomes obsolete once the new conception replaces it. Literature is art. Literature is repetitive. Literature is always involved with archetypal human situations in the family and in society. Literature is always concerned with abiding moral problems and value conflicts that arise between and within individual human beings in their living experience of the universal human emotion of love and hate, the universal human conflicts between self and other, humanity and nature, and the universal human predicament of good and evil. Literature is primary. Theory is secondary. Theory is the servant of literature. We always learn more about ourselves and others as individual human beings from literature than from theory. Theories are fine as long as we recognize that literature is finer. If we study Western theory, we will learn a great deal about what Western academics think.

43 Again, as Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester note in their introduction to The Literary Absolute: “The received notion of literature, in other words, which assumes in particular that literature is different from and external to philosophy in various ways (and can thus perennially bemoan ‘external’ incursions on the part of philosophy or ‘theory’ into properly literary problems), is in fact philosophical through and through” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, xiv).

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But only if we read modern and contemporary Chinese literature itself will we know what modern and contemporary Chinese people are.44

In later chapters, I will have occasion to show just how remarkably Duke’s above description repeats the central critical operations of socialist realist thought. The emphasis upon universality, archetypicality, and especially the diremption of artistic from scientific knowledge, aligns Duke’s effort to properly delimit (“Western”) theory’s role in Chinese literary studies with Cai Yi’s Marxist philosophical aesthetics in ways that will become clearer in chapters three and four. At this point, I would like only to underscore just how precisely Duke has delineated in fundamental features of what I have been referring to as the modern determination or concept of literature. As the above should at least suggest, there is a good deal more at stake in Duke’s defense of C. T. Hsia as a New Critic and founder of the North American canon of modern Chinese literature. It is symptomatic that Duke skirts the problem of New Criticism, much less anything of its complex cultural and political history, and seems more intent on simply dispensing completely with the problem once and for all. Content to “discard the New Critic’s theory of the aesthetic object” (65), Duke makes the somewhat anodyne affirmation of the necessity of a “close reading.”45 But in doing so, we would deprive ourselves of the possibility of critically examining the nature of this particular canon’s formation. For Duke, the problem is reduced to the purely practical issue of deciding which texts graduate students should read. The question remains, however, what would authorize us to strip Hsia’s canon of the very theoretical premises that played so important a role in its formation in the first instance. If this particular modern canon can be shown to be the product of a specific conception of what a proper literary text is—and by necessary extension, the proper method for reading such a text—then it seems notably unhelpful to assert the essential irrelevance of New Critical conceptions of the “aesthetic object.”

Duke, “Thoughts,” 63–64. It is essential to distinguish between the institutional practice of “close reading” of literary texts, especially as that practice characterizes modern Chinese literary studies and the commitment to read all texts closely. As may by now be clear, this book is organized around the conviction that we are still in need of a better understanding how to situate the practice of “close readings” institutionally and historically in modern Chinese literary studies. 44 45

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My point is not simply that modern Chinese literary studies owes to New Criticism a far larger and more complex debt than has generally been acknowledged.46 More importantly, a more careful examination of the “cultural politics” of North American New Criticism such as Jancovich and especially Gerald Graff provide enables, quite remarkably, a much clearer insight into what becomes in China in the early 1940s socialist realist aesthetics itself. There will, of course, be no mistaking the differences between New Criticism and Marxist aesthetics. But both share a similar origin in what each understood as a modern cultural crisis brought on by the rampant cultural predations of positivist science, which threatened the fundamental integrity of human being. In a real sense, the issue has long been less the need for modern Chinese literary studies to engage in a future-oriented and anxiety fraught effort to break with its New Critical foundations and “catch up” with the work of colleagues in the Western literature departments than to take much more seriously its own past.47 As I will show in my discussion of Cai Yi, the failure to provide a critical account of modern Chinese literary studies’ relation to New Criticism meant that it would be all the more difficult to register what was at stake in the problem of modern Chinese aesthetics. The reduction of New Criticism to the practice of “close reading” only made it more difficult to provide a merely adequate genealogy of Chinese socialist realism. This also means that as uncomfortable Wang and Duke may be with the criticisms that have been registered against C. T. Hsia, it clarifies little to argue that Hsia’s History was not in some profound sense “a product of Cold War cultural politics.”48

46 David Wang’s introduction to the 1999 edition of Hsia’s History discusses the latter’s relation to New Criticism, though apart from a brief and general mention of some of the cultural values associated with New Criticism, his discussion is more biographical than genealogical. But further, as I will show in subsequent chapters, the actual cultural values Hsia derived from New Criticism are quite far removed from the ones Wang mentions. 47 Perry Link writes: “At first, this effort felt like ‘catching up,’ and some even resented their graduate training in Chinese departments for having failed to prepare them in the techniques of literary analysis. But the most common response was fresh excitement: we can now look at the whole field anew, analyzing texts as works of art rather than reports on history; we can use Western literary theory to reexamine the assumptions that undergird both Chinese writing and our own approaches to it; through comparative literature, we can broaden our own horizons as well as those of our Europeanist colleagues” (Perry Link, “Ideology and Theory,” 5). 48 Wang, “Introduction to History,” ix.

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I will argue in my discussion of Cai Yi that New Criticism and Chinese socialist realist aesthetics provide widely divergent responses to a shared set of problems and do so with a clear eye to the problem of capital. For this reason, claiming Hsia’s book was not powerfully informed by postwar geopolitics is problematic, since it risks mistakenly imagining the New Critical methodological premise of “disinterestedness” did not itself have a very specific modern theoretical provenance. Furthermore, the very history of the concept of disinterestedness itself speaks to yet another focus of the present work, namely that the concept was by no means unique to North American New Critics but in fact profoundly shaped the formation of the modern concept of literature in China.49 Our inability to not only acknowledge and provide a critical account for the notion of disinterestedness in Hsia’s New Critical Chinese canon, renders us wholly incapable of recognizing the vast degree to which this concept informs so much of the development of modern Chinese literature and aesthetics. This accounts as well for the anxiety prone references to what are ritualistically invoked as “Western theory’s” problematic relation to modern Chinese literature. It is part of the aim of this book to suggest not only that the qualification of theory as “Western” introduces a false and ahistorical distinction that is highly misleading. As I mentioned above, I want to show how the essential relationship between literature, theory/criticism, and philosophy which would come to generate everything from New Criticism and socialist realist theory to all varieties of poststructuralist literary theory was no less powerfully operative in modern Chinese literature than it was in the West. It is all the more important to keep in mind that when I claim that those premises were operative in China throughout the 20th century, I am not limiting myself to the sphere of Chinese literary criticism, but including the production of Chinese literature itself. In other words, the modern concept of literature refers not simply to the way literary criticism understands its object, but also to how that object as literature is formed in relation to criticism. That the latter issue is clearest in the case of the Chinese socialist realist Bildungsroman provides only the limit instance of this fact and should not obscure the fact that it obtains as well with Lu Xun decades earlier.

49 As I show in my chapter on Song of Youth, this ultimately Kantian notion plays a decisive role in the heroine Lin Daojing’s ᨋ㆏㕒 ideological Bildung (formation).

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I have argued above that what comprises most of the familiar critical moves and tropes in contemporary literary theory would not have appeared nearly as alien to Chinese intellectuals who had been critically active since the May Fourth period. Elsewhere, I have examined the Hegelian turn in studies of a materialist dialectic in the early 1950s, showing that the work of Zhang Shiying 张世英 should be seen as the inevitable consequence not simply of a desire to better clarify Chinese Marxism’s debt to Hegel.50 Rather, it should also be seen as a necessary element in the broader need to better understand the scope of philosophical aesthetics and its practical/political consequences. Above, I described the degree to which the resistance of “Western” theory in the study of Chinese literature was symptomatic of the near total absence of continental philosophy in North American universities. My point was that the complex relationship between literature, theory/criticism, and modern philosophy was one that Chinese writers and critics had been negotiating in an astonishing variety of different forms from the beginning of the century. It was thus a relationship that reflected more than anything else a specifically modern conception of literature in the Chinese intellectual milieu, even if one does not find the conception articulated in China in quite the same explicit fashion as René Wellek and Raymond Williams, much less Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy. The field of modern Chinese literary studies in North America, such as it was initially organized around the New Critical impulses of C. T. Hsia, would inevitably suffer from a combination of bewilderment and frustration at the encroachment of what it took to be especially continental literary theory into the disciplinary ranks of modern Chinese literature. But it is salutary to consider just how different the case was in China. Scholars of Chinese literature who are understandably sensitive to the Chinese literary bureaucratic interventions of censorship may not recognize the degree to which the stifling of debate in literary circles simply did not obtain in quite the same way in the study of aesthetics and philosophy. While in the North American academy, continental philosophy was forcefully purged beginning especially after the war, translations of Hegel’s work appeared in China on a nearly annual basis from 1950 through to 1966 on the eve of the Cultural

50

Button, “Zhang Shiying,” 63–68.

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Revolution.51 This is all the more remarkable given the fact that Hegel was deemed no less ideologically suspect by Chinese Marxism than he was anathema to Canadian and US philosophy departments.52 Furthermore, throughout the same period, Hegel scholarship continued, including at least two works on Hegel published in the early 1970s during the Cultural Revolution, one of which was written by one of China’s foremost Hegel scholars, Zhang Shiying. The example of Hegel is significant in terms of our understanding of how the literature/theory relation compares in 20th-century China on the one hand and 20th-century North America on the other. Given the degree to which continental philosophy vanished from the North American philosophy curricula after World War II and the opposite degree to which Hegel had remained a vital, if bitterly contested, presence in critical circles from the 1930s through to the present in China, one hardly need wonder why the intellectual backgrounds in China and the North American faculties of modern Chinese literature differed so vastly. At precisely the time modern Chinese literary studies in the West were pondering anxiously how to “catch up” with their colleagues in Western literature departments, China’s New Period intellectuals were reacquainting themselves with elements of modern (continental) philosophical thought that had been the norm in China since the turn of the century. As has been well documented, the late seventies and early eighties witnessed a surge of interest in Kant and Hegel that has continued unabated until today. Had that phenomenon been recognized by Western China studies at the time, it would like have been perceived as part of a “post-Mao” rehabilitation of philosophy departments in Chinese universities after a 40-year ban on any reading, public discussion, or publication of anything but Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao. Nor would it necessarily have been immediately apparent why a lengthy study of Kant by a 51 As Wang Ban notes, “The study of aesthetics has been and remains a major intellectual and cultural activity in twentieth-century China. In the People’s Republic, aesthetics as a discipline has been a university course with standard textbooks. The aesthetics curriculum was officially launched in 1960, when the country was experiencing natural disasters, famine and political instability.” He further shows that aesthetics was part of the Party School curriculum beginning in 1962. Zong Baihua’s 1964 translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Zhu Guangqian’s translation of the first volume of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics in 1959 were both the result of the “aesthetics debate” that took place between 1956 and 1962. Wang Ban, Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 17–18. 52 See McCumber, Time in the Ditch, 1–57.

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Chinese Marxist philosopher in 1979, Li Zehou’s ᧘泽厚 A Critique of the Critical Philosophy: A Commentary on Kant 批判哲学的 批判:康德述评 would have sated the “intellectual hunger” of a scholar of literature such as Liu Kang.53 After all, why in the period immediately following the Cultural Revolution, when Western scholars were noting the emergence of Scar Literature, would young Chinese intellectuals who had endured all the deprivations described so effectively in that literature flock to bookstores to read the ponderous and “repetitive” critical reflections of a Chinese Marxist theoretician on Immanuel Kant? But as Liu Kang reminds us: But, surprisingly, the first edition of 30,000 copies sold out quickly, and the second edition of some 40,000 was as popular as the first edition on the market. The book indeed induced “Kant Fever” of no small scale in China’s intellectual circles.54

At precisely the same time, the remaining volumes of Zhu Guangqian’s ᧇశẜ translation of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics were being published marking the advent of an “aesthetics fever” (meixuere) that would spread throughout the very same New Period intellectual community. As readers of Liu Kang’s essay quoted above well know, very much unlike the situation in the Western China studies for whom “Western theory” appeared not only alien but also as part of the field’s belated methodological upgrade, Liu Kang speaks overwhelmingly in terms of a return to an engagement with what since Wang Guowei ₺࿖维 had been central philosophemes of 20th century Chinese thought.55 By the same token, if Western students of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in 1996 were perhaps somewhat better prepared to understand what was conceptually at stake in Zhang Xudong’s confession that he began his book on Chinese modernism as an “Hegelian,” it was not because of any context the field of Chinese literature formed under the New Critical orientation of C. T. Hsia could ever have provided. No doubt for many, Zhang was simply picking up and working with more of the

53 Liu Kang, “Subjectivity, Marxism and Cultural Theory,” in Politics, Ideology and Literary Discourse in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 23–55, 33. 54 Liu Kang, “Subjectivity, Marxism and Cultural Theory,” 32. 55 Jing Wang in her article “ ‘Who Am I?’—The Question of Voluntarism in the Paradigm of ‘Socialist Alienation,’ ” positions: east asia cultures critique 3, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 448–480, notes “repressed memory of early history of Marx.”

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same “Western theory” the rest of his North American colleagues in Chinese literary studies felt compelled to contend with.56 The Two (post-) Metaphysical Trajectories in the Formation of Modern Chinese Literature: Toward a Clear Definition of “Man” At the beginning of this chapter, I identified two separate trajectories for the formation of a canon of modern Chinese literature: Mao Dun’s prospective one based upon national character and C. T. Hsia’s retrospective one from 1961. I would like here to further adumbrate in broad strokes the contours of the argument I propose for this book based on the way each of those trajectories appeals to and draws upon different (post-)metaphysical conceptions of human being. In each case, for both Chinese realism (and socialist realism) as well as C. T. Hsia, the figure of the human is of decisive importance. As we will see, Hsia and Lu Xun participate equally in the much vaster modern project that seeks to affirm and realize the essence of the human, if in different ways. In the case of Hsia’s New Critical method, I argue that this problem is registered as onto-theology. Inevitably as well, even for readers who have found themselves pondering precisely what Hsia meant when he wrote that since they lacked a concept of Original Sin, modern Chinese writers were constitutionally incapable of thinking deeply about the human condition, this invocation of Heidegger’s concept of onto-theology in reference to Hsia, may well appear unsettling, if not gratuitous.57 But as subsequent chapters will show, the onto-theologics

56 Perry Link’s claim that for some PRC students in the 1980s and 1990s “[c]ritical theory was, first, undeniably and purely a Western thing” is somewhat misleading precisely on this count. No doubt for some such students, the theory they encountered in the West, translated from French into English, seemed to them entirely foreign, and surely the names Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin were unfamiliar. But if the intellectual deprivations of the Cultural Revolution had left such students with little sense of critical currents in the West, for precisely the same reason, such students likely knew equally little about the critical orientations of multiple generations of modern Chinese intellectuals educated up until the Cultural Revolution. Vera Schwarcz, as is well known, argues that already two entire generations of Chinese intellectuals who had “challenged the Confucian imperial system” preceded that of May Fourth students who were born in the 1890s. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkely: University of California Press, 1986), 24. 57 In his conclusion to the History, Hsia writes, “The superficiality of modern Chinese literature is ultimately seen in its intellectual unawareness of Original Sin

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of Arthur K. Smith’s “soul” and C. T. Hsia’s Original Sin, have remarkable corollaries in what becomes in 20th-century China a (post-) metaphysical discourse of onto-typology: first, in “Ah Q” as the initial modern Chinese instance of the “type” (dianxing) and then in Cai Yi’s critical philosophical aesthetic grounding of the “type” in socialist realist theory. Indeed, as I will also show in chapter four, Cai Yi’s treatment of the problem can best be understood in relation to Heidegger himself, who was writing at exactly the same time in the early 1940s. Thus, it should be clear that my reference to onto-theology in Hsia’s critical discourse is not meant as a North American liberal, secular humanist term of opprobrium. Rather, I want only to underscore the fact that neither Hsia’s History nor the New Criticism that undergirds it escape what Peter Carravetta has termed the “metaphysical moralizing” such figures as William Spanos and Frank Lentrecchia have shown pervades New Criticism.58 Hsia’s linkage of what he finds to be the overall shallowness of modern Chinese literature to not only a congenital inability to grasp the true nature of human evil, but also more pointedly to the naïve rationalist/materialist conviction that human moral weakness can be overcome through human effort is, to be sure, precisely “metaphysical moralizing.” What is surprising is that Hsia’s diagnosis is so little remarked upon, save occasionally by Chinese wondering, quite legitimately, what he could have possibly meant. Liu Kang questions Hsia’s claim, but perhaps does not go far enough in asking what role it plays in his critical inventory of modern Chinese fiction as a whole. What Liu Kang’s engagement with this issue attests to is the inevitable sense that Hsia’s belief that, absent the specifically Christian conception of

or some comparable religious interpretation of evil. When evil is seen as something that can be overcome by sheer human effort and determination, one is no longer able to encompass the domain of tragic experience. In view of the absence of tragedy in traditional Chinese drama and of the strong satiric tradition in Ming and Ch’ing fiction (the distinguished exception is the tragic novel Dream of the Red Chamber), one may legitimately wonder whether the study of Western literature has in any significant manner enriched the spiritual life of the Chinese” (Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 504). The term ontotheology is originally Kant’s and was meant to describe proofs of God’s existence based on concepts that do not require recourse to experience. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan Company, 1933), 525. I discuss Heidegger’s specific inflection of the term in more detail in later chapters. 58 Peter Carravetta, Prefaces to the Diaphora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), 272.

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Original Sin, neither Chinese nor Western writers could produce great works of literature.59 For Heidegger, the concept of onto-theology is meant to answer the question of how “God” enters modern metaphysics in such a way as to complete the system as a whole.60 In a similar way, the theological doctrines of evil and Original Sin serve a similar function for Hsia’s New Criticism. It is difficult not to conclude that Hsia was first introduced to the problem of Original Sin as a literary critical problem in a graduate seminar with Brooks during the course of which the latter had included in the semester’s readings works by Tate and Ransom that addressed the relationship between modern literature and (Christian) humanity’s fallen condition. Jancovich addresses this issue in his treatment of Allen Tate: The literary text was seen as capable of reasserting the limits of positivism and of emphasizing the historical and material contexts of human activity. These were seen by Tate in specifically religious terms as Original Sin, or the presence and limits of human nature, of the past, and of history. His critique of modern society was that it had not come to terms with the presence of human nature, but saw it merely as something to be rationalized, controlled and used.61

The New Critical presence of the concept of Original Sin located decisively in the conclusion of Hsia’s History, where the reader’s attention is drawn to the author’s final critical judgments on the course of modern Chinese literature up to that historical point in time, is by no means accidental, nor would we be well advised to dismiss it as an idiosyncratic irruption in what has no doubt otherwise been viewed as a consistently secular humanist work of modern North American literary scholarship. My interest here has little to do with Hsia’s own religious convictions, but rather with the way the concept of Original Sin serves a supplementary, onto-theological purpose in his criticism. More importantly, I am also interested in the genealogy of this notion with respect to modern China. It is just as vital to keep in mind that my aim is to situate more accurately Hsia’s work in relation to the

59 Except when the term is used in quotation, I will preserve Hsia’s capitalization of Original Sin throughout. 60 See Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Modern Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1969) 42–74. I discuss this problem in more detail below. 61 Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143.

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much broader currents of a literary modernity heavily invested in a philosophical/theological conception of being. There are, for example, several versions of the concern for the lack of a belief in China in the doctrine of Original Sin. As Eric Jozef Ziolkowski shows in his discussion of Anthony Yu, there is a more contemporary Protestant version of this notion. Discussing one of Yu’s earlier essays, Ziolkowski notes the role of the “tragic” in Yu’s article on Confucianism. The first of these tragic elements is the “moral dilemma imposed upon sons and fathers by Analects [Lunyu 论语] 13.18; and secondly the abyss that Confucius, lacking the notion of original sin, ignored between the dimensions of obligation [Reinhold Niebuhr’s] (“I ought”) and ability (“I can”) in the moral self.”62 This version of China’s absent conception of “original sin” is noteworthy not only for its contemporary Protestant provenance. For our purposes, as I will show in chapter two, the more distant origin of this doctrine is, significantly, the 19th century work of Protestant missionaries/sinologists living in China. When Arthur K. Smith takes up the problem of “Polytheism” in a late chapter in his Chinese Characteristics, he draws on the authority of Ernst Faber, the German Protestant missionary and sinologist, who in a tract entitled A Systematical Digest of the Doctrines of Confucius According to the Analects, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean, listed twenty-four “defects and errors of Confucianism.” I list four of the first six. 1. Confucianism recognizes no relation to a living God. 2. There is no distinction made between the human soul and the body, nor is there any clear definition of man, either from a physical or from a psychological point of view. 5. There is wanting in Confucianism a decided and serious tone in its treatment of the doctrine of sin, for with the exception of moral retribution in social life it mentions no punishment for sin. 6. Confucianism is generally devoid of a deeper insight into sin and evil.63

62 Anthony Yu and Eric Jozef Ziolkowski, Literature, Religion, And East/West Comparison: Essays in Honor of Anthony C. Yu (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 8. 63 Arthur Henderson Smith, Chinese Characteristics (Safety Harbor, FL: Simon Publications, 2001; originally published in Shanghai: North-China Herald, 1890). Smith quoted from Ernst Faber, A Systematical Digest of the Doctrines of Confucius, According to the Analects, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean, trans. P. G. von Moellendorff. Boston:

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What interests me here is the constellation of symptoms that collectively point to the incapacity to ponder human evil with any true, inward depth of understanding. Quite clearly, this particular 19th century European Protestant form of “metaphysical moralizing” about the godless state of the Chinese soul differs substantially in tenor from the form in which we encounter it in C. T. Hsia, tempered as his critical ethos is with a superficial measure of a more secularized humanism characteristic of postwar Yale.64 As I will show in chapter two, Arthur Smith has generally been misread as offering merely a long list of odious Chinese habits, many of them admittedly moral. But what readers of Smith sometimes fail to recognize is that his critique of the Chinese national character was premised entirely on the conviction that lacking any “relation to the living God,” Chinese (and for Smith, not just Confucian Chinese, but Chinese as such) likewise lacked a conception of a human soul. For Smith, no reform of the Chinese character could ever be possible unless these two metaphysical voids were first met with a properly Christian sense of transcendence—one capable of lifting the Chinese soul into the spiritual reaches denied it by the earthbound nature of its indigenous metaphysical systems. Smith ends his introduction with a quote from an address by Lord Elgin to a group of Shanghai merchants: In the rivalry which will then ensue [between China and West], Christian civilization will have to win its way among a skeptical and ingenious people, by making it manifest that a faith which reaches to heaven furnishes better guarantees for public and private morality than one which does not rise above the earth.65

Jon Solomon is the very first to have analyzed the “deeply politicized question of an onto-theo-logical judgment upon nothing less—and nothing more—than China’s soul” which, he shows continues to profoundly shape intellectual discourse in China. Solomon’s analysis ties together the multiple concerns of the West’s onto-theo-logical diagnosis of China’s spiritual deficiency, the formation of the “private” moral Chinese subject (such as Elgin notes is finally possible only with Christian civilization) with a keen awareness of what amounts to “China’s Adamant Media Corporation, 2004) 124–125. For a brief biography of Faber, see http://ricci.rt.usfca.edu/biography/view.aspx?biographyID=1527. 64 Faber’s digest was delivered in July 1872 as a lecture to a gathering conference of German Rhenish missionaries Missionaries in Hong Kong (Faber, “Preface,” 1). 65 Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 15.

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inscription . . . into the equally ideological figure of onto-theo-logical aesthetics.”66 As I have suggested above and will show in what follows, the discourse of aesthetics in the twentieth century is the site of a transformation from the onto-theological into the (post-)metaphysical onto-typological, of which the literary figure of the type (dianxing) is the clearest expression in China. In other words, it is vital that we confront the way the discourse of Chinese national character is initially saturated by theology. For literary figures such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun, it is hardly surprising that the specifically Christian theological grounding of Smith’s national character critique was not something they could ever endorse—and nothing could be clearer on this count than their separate endorsements of Nietzsche. But their intellectual refusal of Smith’s Christianity did not mean that they were incapable of transforming that ground in a manner that they felt was better suited to the needs of the properly human. As I will argue, both Lu Xun and Mao Dun will never fail to endorse Smith’s (Faberian) national-character critique of Confucianism for its congenital failure to provide a “clear definition of man [sic].”67 The discourse of national character, as the explicitly literary (and aesthetic) problem Mao Dun affirmed at the beginning of this introduction, is thus decisively linked to a proper conception of the fully human. Modern Chinese literature’s task will therefore be to take up the problem of figuring typologically China’s national character precisely in light of a “clear” image of the human as such. To put it another way, to exactly the same degree that the possibility of Smith’s critique of a Chinese national character was conditioned wholly by an onto-theological investment in a clear image of the essence of the human as soul, Mao Dun and Lu Xun take up the literary problem of China’s national character in relation to what becomes the paramount problem of a progressive Marxist aesthetics throughout almost the entire course of 20th century China, namely this same human essence, though grounded ontoypologically.68 As Solomon underscores in his reading of Liu Xiaobo, “[o]ne of the theological names for the objectivity of

66 Jon Solomon, “The Sovereign Police and Knowledgeable Bodies: Liu Xiaobo’s Exilic Critique of Politics and Knowledge,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 10, no. 2 (2002): 399–429, 400. 67 Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 307–8. 68 I examine this problem in more detail in chapter two in relationship to Lu Xun and then again in chapter four, in relationship to Cai Yi.

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human essence is the ‘soul’.”69 In short, what the following chapters will affirm is the necessity of properly mooring our reading of national character discourse in China in relation to the (post-)metaphysical conception of human species-being that grounds it. I would like to return to the problem with which I began, namely the need to provide an account of why the discourse of national character would find itself inscribed within the spheres of literature, art, and aesthetics in modern China. The problem of the modern conception of literature in China must address what I have termed the peculiar conjugation of national character and (the) true (essence of) art. The sphere of the aesthetic in China thus becomes the space of a continuous oscillation between exemplary literary figurations of modern Chinese subjects-in-formation and the fully realized human as such. At the risk of redundancy, in very much the same way that for Smith the Confucian Chinese failure to recognize a soul accounted for the absence of a clear conception of the human figure in China, 20thcentury progressive Chinese intellectuals and writers looked increasing to the concept of “human species-being” as vital to the formation of modern Chinese subjects. As Marc Redfield insists, Because aesthetic education is at once the universal history “of man” and the specific history of acculturation of certain groups and individuals, aesthetics provides a powerful self-validating mechanism for the representativeness of the social groups which can claim to have achieved and inherited this understanding of acculturation. The solely empirical qualities of being European, white, middle-class, male and so on become either tacitly or overtly essentialized as privileged sites in the unfolding of an irreversible aesthetic history. Thus from the sober precincts of philosophy one is led with disconcerting speed to the large reaches of ideology; indeed, ideology then becomes a limit-term difficult to control. For this aesthetic logic of exemplarity subtends powerful Western ideas and discourses of the self, the nation, the race, historical process, literary canon, and the function of criticism; it informs the role of the cultural sphere in modern Western societies, and the mission of the humanities in the modern university.70

What Redfield argues about the emergence of aesthetic ideology in “Western societies,” I will show, powerfully informs not only the emergence of modern literature in China. Having done so, we may find

69 70

Solomon, “Sovereign Police,” 400. Redfield, Phantom Formations, ix.

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ourselves in a position to better account for some of the countless and seemingly intractable political and ideological issues that have dominated that process since the early 20th century. It is vital to emphasize the fact that what Redfield describes above as the “aesthetic logic of exemplarity” is precisely what governs the formation of a post-Smith and hence post-onto-theological, May Fourth discourse of national character, as well as the modern conception of “human essence” that serves as its ground and point of orientation. The reason why this problem becomes so central in China is simply because this human essence is what Marx termed “species-being of man” (Gattungswesen des Menschen).71 In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes, “Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object . . . but also . . . because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore free being.”72 In other words, human species-being exists by virtue of the fact the humans recognize not simply their own individuality, but that they also recognize their participation with others in the same species.73 To “actuali[ze] the genre of the human” would be to realize this universality as freedom.74 As I will later show, this conception offers an important clue to the reading of Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s novel Hongyan, which I take up in my conclusion. But we should also take care to note that this set of issues in Redfield’s careful study of the problematic literary genre of the Bildungsroman is linked directly to the problems of the formation of the literary canon and literary criticism. For Redfield emphasizes that it is in especially the case of the Bildungsroman that the tripartite relationship noted above

71 For an excellent account of the debates in China in the 1950s and the early 1960s, see Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and their Western Contemporaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 72 Marx and Engels, Reader, 75. 73 Robert C. Tucker provides a helpful gloss. “Man is not only conscious of himself as a member of the human species, and so he apprehends a ‘human essence’ which is the same in himself and other men. According to Feuerbach this ability to conceive of ‘species’ is the fundamental element in the human power of reasoning: ‘Science is the consciousness of species.’ Marx, while not departing from this meaning of the terms, employs them in other contexts; and insists more strongly than Feuerbach that since this ‘species-consciousness’ defines the nature of man, man is only living and acting authentically (i.e. in accordance with his nature) when he lives and acts deliberately as a ‘species-being,’ that is as a social being” (The Marx-Engels Reader, ed., Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. [New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 1978], 33–34 n9). 74 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, trans. and ed. Simon Sparks (London: Routledge, 1997), 111.

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in the modern conception of literature, namely philosophy, literature, and criticism, realizes itself most fully. This is because the modern discourse of aesthetics is preoccupied with the formation (Bildung) of the human subject in a manner that Chinese critical discourse takes up with increasing urgency in the early-20th century and pursues nearly without interruption, in particular via literary production and criticism. This will lead, finally and with a certain historical inevitability to the creation of Chinese socialist realist Bildungsroman(e), such as Song of Youth, the novel I discuss in chapter five. For as is very well known, it is the cultivation of exemplary Chinese subjects that very quickly comes to dominate both literary creation and literary criticism, powerfully shaping discourses of subjectivity in the political and social spheres of post-liberation China. It is precisely for this reason that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy insist that what they term the literary absolute “aggravates and radicalizes the thinking of totality and the Subject.”75 Redfield notes two dimensions of this problem that I will examine in the case of the two novels, Song of Youth and Red Crag. First, the Subject, in the “full metaphysical sense” I have spoken of in terms of onto-theology and onto-typology, discovers in literature “its most immediate self-image.” Second, the modern Subject emerges as “Bildung, ‘the putting-into-form of form,’ the elaboration of the Subject in the specifically aesthetic terms of phenomenal or sensory realization.”76 It is in light of this problem of the Subject and its relation to the discourse of literary exemplarity that we can best understand what has with remarkable consistency shaped the formation of modern Chinese literature.

75 76

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 15. Redfield, Phantom Formations, 46.

CHAPTER ONE

THE TRIALS OF CHINESE LITERARY REALISM It was no doubt inevitable that in the 1990s the history of Chinese literary realism would find itself confronted with what had boiled down to some of the basic tenets of poststructuralism, especially regarding “the sign.” The random play of the signifier seemed perfectly suited to bring down the creaky and tottering edifice of what by the 1980s had become the official Chinese literary bureaucratic doctrine of realism. Such was the case at least in Western studies of the subject. In many of the literary debates in China beginning in the early 1980s, one senses strongly that the bitterly estranged literary siblings of realism and modernism of modern Chinese literature offered an especially compelling drama through which practically all the most vital issues of the day, including Deng’s reforms, opening to the West, the Party’s political dominance in the arts, etc. could be negotiated and contested. Given the sclerotic and stultifying tenor of the denunciations of modernism by the CCP’s cultural leadership in the wake of the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign in 1984, it was almost impossible not to view the Party dicta on China’s modern literary tradition of realism as historically irrelevant to contemporary concerns. Realism seemed to have long since ceased to embody a successful attempt to forge a coherent literary-theoretical position that could account for the complexity of 20th-century Chinese history. Indeed, it was precisely this connection between literary realism and actual history upon which so much had long been staked. Come the early 1980s, the bureaucratic articulations of the importance of realism came to be viewed as the quite naked pretext for asserting the reform regime’s control over nearly all intellectual matters.1 In the West in the 1990s, Chinese realism’s showdown with predominantly American renditions of poststructuralism as literary theory would map out a radically different critical topos. No longer was it a question of weighing the relative merits of modernism versus realism for literary 1 For a careful and comprehensive discussion of the debates in China on realism in the 1980s, see Wendy Larson, “Realism, Modernism, and the Spiritual Pollution Campaign,” Modern China 15, 1 (1989): 37–71.

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production as had so often been the case in China a decade earlier. Instead, the focus turned to a critique of the very project of modern literary realism in China, a critique that aimed straightaway at its most radical source in Lu Xun. If it seemed a given to the Chinese cultural critique intelligentsia in the 1980s that socialist realism itself was all but finished and required little critical attention, the more fundamental problem in Western studies of Chinese realism seemed to be finding the theoretical and aesthetic (mis-)origins of realism in China. It is less surprising that the focus of critical attention in Lu Xun would not be the latter’s well-known public support for realism in China later in his career, but would be, rather, his very first short story, “Diary of a Madman” (狂人日记). Not satisfied with assessing the merits of the numerous cases made for realism as a literary doctrine in the 1930s, Western scholarship sought to divine the flaws in the project of Chinese realism prior to its actual formation as such, in what has been universally regarded as China’s first modern short story.2 In other words, the focus would be upon realism in its most incipient form, before it gradually coalesced into a series of comprehensive theoretical propositions about literature. The diversity of interpretations of “Diary of a Madman” is significant, especially in light of their shared end, namely a clear delineation of the political, historical, and ideological consequences of what Anderson would famously term the “limits of realism” in China. Examining the exegetic work of Xiaobing Tang, Marsten Anderson and David Wang on the problem of realism will help to set the stage for the reading of socialist realist aesthetics and literature that comprises the majority of this book. Both Anderson and Wang have produced two of the longest works devoted entirely to Chinese realism. I will not discuss either work in its entirety, as my focus is solely upon the definitions of realism that each elaborates as a means to ground their respective studies. Xiaobing Tang’s well-known MLA article on “Diary of a Madman” deserves parallel treatment since it is equally preoccupied with what happens (or more accurately, what does not happen) to realism under the pen of Lu Xun. As I will show below, the focus upon Lu Xun is entirely justified, though the conclusion each critic derives from their own encounter with Lu Xun’s literary work makes Sylvia Chan treats the debates about realism as they formed in the late 1920s and Lu Xun’s beleaguered status within those debates in “Realism or Socialist Realism? The ‘Proletarian’ Episode in Modern Chinese Literature,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 9 ( Jan. 1983): 55–74. 2

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it difficult to provide any account of Chinese realism that would extend from what has been conventionally understood as its initial “phase” of “critical realism” to its subsequent “development” into “socialist realism” (sometimes termed “revolutionary realism”), the subject of this book. Indeed, the look into the relatively distant literary realist past of Lu Xun’s 1918 “Diary of a Madman” results in a significant occlusion of what would happen to realism later in the 1940s and 1950s.3 As I analyze some of the limitations of these readings, what I want to underscore is a certain vaguely poststructuralist consensus regarding the (absent) foundations of Chinese realism in Lu Xun. I will do so in order to suggest that we have very good reason to believe Lu Xun the writer is tied directly to the origins of Chinese realism, though perhaps more directly via “The True Story of Ah Q.” My purpose will not be to suggest that the three critics have misidentified the origination of realism in the wrong work of Lu Xun’s fiction. Nor especially will I be arguing that the more relevant “True Story of Ah Q ,” is capable of redeeming the project of Chinese realism from the numerous charges leveled against it not only by the three writers discussed here, but also by others far too numerous to detail, from the late 1920s through to the 1980s. If the “True Story of Ah Q ,” registers for the first time in modern Chinese fiction the problem of the “type” (dianxing), the consequences are much more far-reaching historically and politically (even geo-politically, in a precise sense I indicate in chapter three) than the confrontation staged by Marston Anderson, Xiaobing Tang, and David Wang between poststructuralism’s arbitrary sign and what Anderson describes as the “epistemological blinders of realism’s claim to truth.”4 Such a designation applies to both Tang and Wang’s theoretical premises, as we shall see to varying degrees of precision.5 But more importantly, the Nietzschean aura one senses in Lu Xun’s earliest literary works, including both “Diary” and “Ah Q” provides an 3 As the scare quotes suggest, we should be wary of any organic metaphor of a literary evolutionary development when it comes to the problem of Chinese realism. For it is the trope of organicism itself that we shall see is perhaps the most resilient and powerful in China’s own articulation of literary modernity in the 20th-century, especially as regards the socialist realist Bildungsroman. 4 Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 8. 5 See Xiaobing Tang, “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ and a Chinese Modernism,” PMLA 107, no. 5 (October 1992): 1222–1234, and David D. W. Wang, The Monster That is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

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important clue to understanding how early Chinese realism would later become so deeply enmeshed in what I will term, after Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the “eidaesthetic” stakes of Chinese socialist realism.6 In other words, Lu Xun (or more precisely “Lu Xun”), is the symptomatic mark of the emergence of a philosophical aesthetic episteme whose force and consequences remained fully effective for well over half a century. It will likewise remain a premise throughout this study that we should be wary of the premature conclusion that what drew so many writers and intellectuals toward what was clearly seen as the promise of literary realism as a means toward a more “fully” human philosophical aesthetics has long since ceased to offer any seductions. If there is a certain unanimity with regard to the critical role played by poststructuralism in the discussions of Tang, Anderson, and Wang, the distance that separates their conclusions is vast indeed. Where Tang reads the decisive emergence of a genuinely critical Chinese modernism, Anderson finds a nascent project of realism that never quite gets off the ground. Wang, very much to the contrary, finds a full-blooded, even ominous “master discourse of realism.” The general tact of all three critical readings of early Chinese realism is to square a semiotic theory of the sign against what is collectively understood as a certain naïve conviction about the referential power of language. That in the cases of especially Wang and Anderson this results in a problematically anachronistic confrontation between the poststructuralist likes of Roland Barthes and a Lu Xun at the time of his penning his first modern short stories is no small irony. For on the one hand Tang, Anderson, and Wang’s discussions in very different ways obscure the path from the early realism of Lu Xun to the full-blown aesthetic theory of realism that

6 I will clarify what is meant by the term eidaesthetics in much greater detail below, especially in relation to Cai Yi and the problem of thinking in images, “xingxiang siwei 形象思维.” For the time being, suffice it to say, the term eidaesthetics for LacoueLabarthe and Nancy is meant to encompass the unique way the aesthetic as art is called upon to present the unpresentable, namely the Idea of freedom as the subject’s identity. In other words, the modern program of eidaesthetics, such as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy define it, undertakes to the task of presenting the philosophical Idea (eidos) in the realm of art (aesthetics) (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Literary Absolute, 37). As I will show in what follows, Lu Xun offers the clearest symptom, if with him largely incipient, of what very rapidly became in China a discourse of realism. I examine Chinese realism precisely in light of the way art and philosophy are brought in a uniquely modern alignment from the 1920s on, culminating in the philosophical aesthetics of socialist realism.

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emerges in the early 1940s, about which the three writers are almost entirely silent. On the other hand, the semiotic insights that coalesced around the figure of Barthes did so precisely in relation to the very doctrine of realism that is left entirely unaddressed by the three writers, namely the far more robust theory of realism one finds not only in George Lukács but as well in the Chinese Marxist theorist, Cai Yi, the subject of chapters three and four. As will become clear, my purpose is by no means to sideline poststructuralism in my examination of Chinese realism, since it is precisely the work of such figures as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe that I will argue can help us best limn the complex contours of the modern discourse of Chinese literary realism. Rather, I will be arguing that in fact semiotics is not diametrically opposed to a naïve Marxist reflection theory, and that the two share a good deal more than has been recognized. In short, my concern is not simply that there is something remarkably ahistorical, even patently unfair about pitting Barthes against Lu Xun of 1918, but rather that doing so sheds little insight on either. I write this recognizing full well that in fact when Barthes is brought critically to bear upon Lu Xun, it is the Party’s gilded, hagiographicised “Lu Xun” that is the target. Keeping this in mind can help us better account for why although Tang, Anderson, and Wang are very clearly taking the “Lu Xun” as Party Cultural Hero as their target, the consequences of each of their readings remains markedly different. The In(ter)vention of Chinese Modernism If Xiaobing Tang goes the farthest toward enabling a genuinely productive encounter between a poststructuralist semiotics and Lu Xun, it is because he is the most sensitive to the complex mediating role of Jameson’s Marxism in that encounter. I will therefore begin with Xiaobing Tang’s lucid and challenging evocation of a “Chinese modernism” in the very text that was conventionally held to inaugurate the project of modern Chinese realism. Tang’s reading is attuned to the multiple historical and postcolonial resonances of the term “Chinese modernism.” His use of the term is explicitly polemical and is meant to unsettle both its ideological nemesis in 1980s China, namely the literary bureaucratic doctrine of “realism,” as well as a certain self-complacent Western understanding of Western modernism, which “subordinate[s]”

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and neutralizes the “modernism of the [Chinese] subaltern subject.”7 The text of “Diary of a Madman” is not modernist simply in terms of “literary effect” (a claim I would argue is problematic) but as a “manifesto of the birth of modern subjectivity . . . [and] . . . a modernist politics in twentieth-century China.”8 There emerge in Tang’s text two historical dimensions against which Lu Xun’s “Chinese modernism” will register its most subversive effects. Tang writes, Against this background, it becomes clear that the motif of modernism, whether expressed through theoretical or literary practices, is one of many cultural strategies for radically transforming social organization and control in an agrarian and authoritarian tradition (the two features may be logically linked). As part of ongoing Cultural Revolution, modernism must introduce a new language, a new mode of textual production and reproduction.9

I draw attention to this particular passage since it accomplishes the uniquely ambivalent historical gambit Tang poses for “Chinese modernism.” The “agrarian and authoritarian tradition” Tang alludes to is as much the one Lu Xun decried in the late teens as it is a post-June Fourth China of the early nineties. The “cultural revolution” of modernism as political-literary project is critically discerned as the contemporarily relevant “subtext” “(re)constructed” over eighty years after the writing of “Diary of a Madman.” Drawing on Jameson’s book Political Unconscious, Tang works a re-reading of “Diary” whose polemical force can be registered in the immediate context of “the officially sanctioned reductive literary criticism” of the 1980s, what I have termed the bureaucratic literary realism, above. Thus, the notion of “modernism” as the grabbag term of every single literary style or movement that did/does not swear abject political obeisance to “(socialist) realism” gives way to a finely honed conception of Lu Xun’s very Nietzschean articulation of a “Chinese modernism” in “Diary of a Madman.” Tang’s approach works to forge precisely the kind of “solidarity” between past and present that Jameson affirms in The Political Unconscious. As Jameson defines one of the key tenets of his work: “Our presupposition, in the analyses that follow, will be that only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of

7 8 9

Tang, “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary,” 1224. Tang, “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary,” 1225. Tang, “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary,” 1225.

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the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures and experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day.”10 Tang likewise carefully abides by another of Jameson’s fundamental concerns, namely to resist the “projections of the modernists” onto the Chinese literary past. This point will be crucial to my discussion below since something of a retroactive poststructuralist projection marks decisively the work of Anderson and Wang. Indeed, what is most compelling about Tang’s discussion is that it manages convincingly to invoke a Lu Xun profoundly at odds with the reified, sclerotic reading of Lu Xun as Party Icon-cum-ideological cudgel used to browbeat wayward literary talent and critics in the 1980s. Jameson himself is able to salvage modernism from its fate of purely reflecting the reification of the bourgeois social sphere by showing that modernist literary works are also “socially symbolic acts” that engage the utopian dimension in a manner that is as vital, contestatory, and dynamic as any “socialist realist” literary act. Tang’s “Chinese Modernism” provides him a critical lever with which to pry loose an equally utopian Nietzschean11 reading of Lu Xun’s Madman as “kuang,” as the “archetypal metaphor for explosive ecstasy (ex-stasis).” No longer confined to a narrowly pathological “insanity,” the Madman’s discourse testifies symbolically to the transgressive irruption of “discursive energy” from deep within the late-imperial neo-Confucian ideological order. By definition, then, kuang stands as a radical shift, in the production of meaning, from the chain of the signified to the elusive chain of the signifier. In other words, kuang switches the whole question from what reality is to how reality is constructed and represented through various sociosymbolic practices, not the least of which are our linguistic conventions.12

What Tang affirms most in the Madman’s symbolic rupture of the discursive order is the “explosive play” at work in the Madman’s reading of history which succeeds in unhinging the sign from its reified referent. What is initially understood to be there in the historical past as

10 Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 18. 11 While Tang is entirely correct to underscore the Nietzschean impulse at work in the “Diary of a Madman,” I believe most of the available textual evidence would suggest that it was Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, rather than, as Tang suggests, the Genealogy of Morals that was likely at work in Lu Xun’s conception of his “kuangren.” 12 Tang, “Lu Xun’s Diary,” 1226.

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the reality the text indicates is displaced by the double operation of revealing the signifier’s arbitrary contingency, while at the same time making manifest what the text refuses to explicitly avow. The interpreter can read the “other thing” only when a new economy of signs dismantles the existing process of ideological reproduction—for the Madman, the dominant value system that legitimizes repression and barbarism in the name of “virtue and morality.”13

This reading of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” poses insurmountable difficulties for the bureaucratic endorsement of Lu Xun’s literary realism in that the latter relies overmuch on an uncritical faith in the capacity of language to reflect reality. This critical failure on the part of the CCP’s literary-theoretical bureaucrats is a charge that is central not only to Tang’s thesis, but also to the premises at work in both Wang and Anderson’s discussions. As I will show later in this book, socialist realist theoretical doctrine itself was very much enamored of a “reflection theory” ( fanyinglun 反映论) that has quite justifiably come under critical scrutiny. Furthermore, in China until the 1980s, language itself and the conditions of the possibility of meaning so central to the linguistic turn that became poststructuralist theory were rarely if ever treated thematically as a source of epistemological concern about the relationship between a text and the reality it was said to reflect. And yet, as I will show in my discussion of Cai Yi, that is hardly because the world presented to the socialist realist artistic producer was deemed to be unproblematic and therefore all too readily able to find unmediated reflection in the finished literary work. Nothing could be further from the truth. Precisely because the aesthetic worker was confronted, even overwhelmed, by a reality that appeared (though only deceptively) stable and coherent, a far more difficult labor awaited them than would ever be required of one whose benighted task was simply to use the supposedly transparent medium of language to reflect the “Real.” This is why I want to draw attention to a specific claim Tang makes in his article, namely that “Diary of a Madman,” “is a key text that unambiguously articulates an entire discursive strategy in modern Chinese culture.”14 As I will show below when I turn to the “realist paradigm” Wang finds in “Diary,” such claims are testimony to Lu Xun’s enduring capacity to

13 14

Tang, “Lu Xun’s Diary,” 1226. Tang, “Lu Xun’s Diary,” 1229.

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serve as the foundational progenitor of any number of theoretical, artistic, and political causes. Given all that has been extravagantly asserted in the name of Lu Xun, a certain caution might be in order—except that there is something fundamentally correct about Tang’s sense of Lu Xun’s importance. Indeed, part of what I will show in the next chapter is that “The True Story of Ah Q” fulfills a comparably broad and far-reaching task, though one whose impact would be felt more directly in the later theoretical discourse of realism. Tang’s very persuasive argument that “Diary” announces the decisive emergence of a genuinely radical epistemic break is warranted for a number of reasons I will take up later. For the time being, I would like first to highlight several other key moments in Tang’s discussion whose importance cannot be overlooked. For despite the very careful excavation of a “Chinese modernism,” whose contemporary thrust is directed precisely at the bureaucratic realism of the New Period, Tang touches upon what I will show are essential critical concerns at work in the earlier philosophical aesthetics of socialist realism in the 1940s. But to clarify at the outset what is at stake here, my purpose is neither to assimilate Tang’s “Chinese modernism” to an earlier socialist realism. Nor especially is it to suggest that what Tang belatedly discovers in Lu Xun, leftist theorists in the 1930s or 1940s had long ago grasped. Rather, what I would like to anticipate here is an argument I will elaborate in more detail in chapters three and four. As the philosophical aesthetic project of realism achieved greater theoretical nuance, it ran head on into precisely the questions Tang convincingly shows are at play in “Diary.” For example, if it is difficult not to agree with Tang that what he aptly terms “institutional realism” “painstakingly delete[s] the notion of subjectivity from literary production,” this does not by any stretch mean that the theory of realist aesthetics we find in the 1940s, paradigmatically in the work of Cai Yi, did not in fact foreground subjectivity as central to the creative process.15 Nor should we imagine that Cai

15 Tang writes, “Indeed, for a period of time, extending to the present, literary production and literary criticism in China, at least in the space allowed by bureaucratic policies, have been closely constrained by the sociologically reductive and epistemologically crippling principle of unreflective and unmediated realism” (Tang, “Lu Xun’s Diary,” 1227). One wonders if the same is still very much the case. In any case, I believe Tang is implicitly acknowledging that the case of Chinese realism was a good deal more complex and dynamic in the decades prior to Lu Xun’s installation as “revolutionary realist” in the 1959 Wang Shiqing piece Tang cites.

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Yi’s New Aesthetics sought to “repress any desire either to cross a given epistemic boundary or to represent a heterogeneous reality.” Perhaps a clue to what is at play here, namely an ambivalent oscillation between the bureaucratic dictates of “institutional realism,” especially in the 1980s, and the theoretical articulation of realist aesthetics in the 1940s, is suggested in the phrase “represent a heterogeneous reality.” On the one hand, it is surely not the case (and nothing in what follows will make any effort to deny) that the socialist realist novel presents the reader with anything remotely approaching a “heterogeneous reality.” The world of Lin Daojing in Yang Mo’s 杨末 Song of Youth (青春之歌) is filled with darkness, but of the clearest most transparent sort—it only flatly figures modern social and political “evil” purged of all possible remnants of an irruptive heterogeneity that might ever unsettle the clarity of the ideological vision she ultimately acquires. But if that is the image of Lin presented to the novel’s readers, it is only because Yang Mo has taken it as her task to represent a reality that is at the outset heterogeneous and opaque, and that remains obdurate in its resistance to representation. That Yang Mo, or any other socialist realist writer or artist, claims to have captured the Real in some sense is beyond doubt. But it is the precise sense in which that claim is asserted within the larger project of Chinese realist aesthetics that is my concern, since to imagine that this Real was merely a revolutionary romantic, idealized “reflection” of reality very much misses the point. Chinese realist aesthetic theory was premised upon a conviction that there exists no transcendental ground upon which to assert the final legitimacy of reality’s essence (benzhi 本质) as realized by the artist through the “epistemological process” (renshi de guocheng 认识的过程). For this reason, theorists such as Cai Yi understood fundamentally that the artist’s task of discovering that essence demanded the full and active involvement of human subjectivity. Put another way, socialist realist aesthetic thought partakes fully of the much vaster modern (anti-)metaphysical project of what Heidegger terms “subjectity.”16 One of my purposes will be to 16 In his essay “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” Heidegger glosses his notion of subjectity as follows: “The being that belongs to what precedes all that has been represented, the being of the subject taken as the subject-object relation reflected in itself, is called subjectity” (Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Kenley Royce Dove [New York: Harper & Row, 1970], 110). I will show how this notion of the subject is cast in Chinese Marxist philosophical aesthetics, doing so by way of Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion in his book Typography. Suffice it to say here at the outset

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show that socialist realism is uncannily familiar and must be understood as taking up the most fundamental tasks of modern humanism in the wake of the abyssal conditions of modernity.17 The Political Unconscious of the “Limits of Realism” It is precisely in this light that we can understand fully what Tang grasps in the “Diary” as the “birth of modern subjectivity” in China I noted above. For if Tang is fundamentally correct in the (non-)foundational privilege he grants to “Diary” and the critical agenda it inaugurates, that is not to say that we should too willingly concede the claim he draws from Marsten Anderson’s fine study of Chinese realism, namely that “the limits of realism are already spotted and underlined.”18 As is very often the case with David Wang’s discussion of realism, the passive construction obscures the question of who is doing the spotting and underlining. The “already” clearly indicates that it is “Lu Xun’s” text that determines those limits, and the readers of Anderson’s text are left to decide on their own whether those limits were consciously placed there by Lu Xun or merely emerged as the unintended consequence of his attempt to create a literary realism that could not be. Here, it is helpful to recall Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious as the “symbolic mediation on the destiny of community.” Keeping this definition provisionally in mind, we will be in a better position to identify and distinguish the different “limits of realism.” Before I turn to Anderson’s approach to realism and the limits he identifies via Lu Xun, Zhang Tianyi, and others, we should note that in Jameson’s sense the limits of realism would be the limits of any and all efforts to narrativize the Real or what for Jameson is the same thing,

that Chinese socialist realism is deeply, even irrevocably, inscribed within the episteme Heidegger describes. As such, it can very much be understood in light of what Tang reads critically in Lu Xun as “Chinese modernism.” 17 In other words, in the modern absence of the divine, human reason, according to Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant, has no ground or foundation. In his “Seminar in Le Thor, 1968” Heidegger quotes Kant who in the Critique of Pure Reason speaks of “the veritable abyss” that is “human reason.” Heidegger comments, “The abyss of the system, as Kant conceives it, lies in that speculative reason finds nothing to establish in regard to what is essential to the production of the system, as ultimate ground of everything” (Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, translated by Andrew Mitchell and Francois Raffoul [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003], 17). 18 Tang, “Lu Xun’s Diary,” 1231.

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namely History—whether (Chinese) modernist, realist, or post-modernist. We should also remain alert to Jameson’s overriding conception of texts as symbolic acts that share “a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from the realm of Necessity.”19 Since history is thus conceived as an “absent cause,” our access to history is limited to the symbolic acts that form texts and other cultural artifacts. As Jameson phrases it, We would therefore propose the following revised formulation: that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.20

“Limit” in this sense would mean that we have no other access to this “absent cause,” save through the text’s symbolic dimension. But Jameson is equally explicit and forceful in cautioning against our interpretation of this specific limit in terms that sometimes accompany invocations of poststructuralist discussions of language and which I will argue below, become the central premises in both Anderson and Wang’s discussions of Chinese realism. Jameson is justly renowned for his formidable capacity to integrate crucial elements of poststructuralist thought—a reworked Lacan in particular—into a larger project that views poststructuralisms (Foucauldian, Derridean, Deleuzian, etc.) as limited in decisive ways. As Dominick La Capra has shown, the political stakes of Jameson’s critical project demanded that in assimilating the Lacanian Real (“what resists symbolization absolutely”) he make some effort to define it: “it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the Real in Lacan. It is simply history itself.”21 For Jameson this is vital, since failure to do so would have resulted in the Political Unconscious having simply repeated what he terms the “ideological double bind, between antiquarianism” on the one hand and a poststructuralist “projection” onto the texts of the historical past, on the other. Of these two modes of interpreting the past, it is the latter that most concerns Jameson. I mean the tendency of much of contemporary theory to rewrite selected texts from the past in terms of their own aesthetic and, in particular,

Jameson, Political Unconscious, 19. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 35. 21 Dominick La Capra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 249. 19 20

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in terms of a modernist (or more properly post-modernist) conception of language. I have shown elsewhere the ways in which such “ideologies of the text” construct a straw man or inessential term—variously called the “readerly” or the “realistic” or the “referential” text—over against which the essential term—the “writerly” or modernist or “open” text, écriture or textual productivity—is defined and with which it is seen as a decisive break.22

Jameson’s own project, like the antiquarianism and the (post)structuralist projection he critiques, is oriented toward conceptualizing the nature of all contemporary efforts to grapple with the cultural artifacts of the past. I would argue that both Anderson and Wang’s texts engage in a very similar projection of a “post-modernist” conception of language onto Lu Xun, or rather “Lu Xun.” By the same token, Tang resists this projection for the most part by virtue of his preservation of a critical utopian dimension in Jameson’s thought. Tang’s reading of kuang in the “Diary” targets very clearly an orthodox regime of literary realism whose “de-humanizing” ideological effects are deemed no less destructive than the neo-Confucian order Lu Xun attacked. For this reason “Chinese modernism” does not attempt to read the “limits of realism” solely in terms of the supposed poststructuralist “truth” about the inevitable failure of language to represent the Real. Tang writes, If the post-modernist play with the floating signifier—with intertextuality, écriture, and the deterritorializing effect of literature—is a replay, on the theoretical plane, of both the modernist ‘aesthetics of perceptual revolution’ and the avant-garde extremist attempt at deinstitutionalizing art, then the intervention of Chinese modernism necessarily opens itself, in a gesture of the utmost urgency and virtual desperation, to all discursive practices opposed to a repressive political order.23

Instead of flatly announcing the “realist” text’s failure to represent the Real, Tang’s reading of Lu Xun allows the Madman’s kuang to infect the stultifying ideological verities of the contemporary Chinese bureaucratic theory of realism. In other words, the Lacanian methodological premise of the Real’s utter resistance to symbolization is not used simply to indict “Lu Xun” or the project of Chinese realism, in toto, as if Chinese realism had ever been foolhardy enough to assert its ability to capture the Real, as such. For this reason, it is not difficult to see in the kuang of Tang/Lu Xun’s Madman something very much 22 23

Jameson, Political Unconscious, 17–18. Tang, “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary,” 1225.

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akin to what Jameson describes as the “mystery [that] can be reenacted only if the human adventure is one: only thus—and not through the hobbies of antiquarianism or the projections of the modernists—can we glimpse the vital claims upon us of . . . long dead issues.”24 Jameson’s embrace of modernism, very much pace Lukács (and Jameson’s own earlier reading of Lukács in Marxism and Form) is premised, as noted above, on the recognition of modernism’s ambivalence. On the one hand, one must acknowledge along with Lukács, that the reification of the capitalist order powerfully informs modernist literature. On the other, Jameson argues that Lukács fails to detect the “revolt” against that very reification.25 As Tang shows, Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” fully attests to the “heightened experience of language in the modern world.”26 But Jameson is also clear that what he terms the “discovery of Language” is part and parcel of the very reification modernist literature embodies. As such, it is an historical moment that does not in itself bar the way forward to any other form of symbolic literary acts. While acknowledging the vital importance of the sensitivity toward the symbolic that modernism expresses, realism is not therefore retroactively deemed somehow deficient, for to argue such would be to engage in the very (post-)modernist projection he critiques. The Stillbirth of Chinese Literary Realism Given what we have seen above in Tang’s nuanced treatment of Chinese modernism, it is not surprising that at the precise moment Tang’s text comes, briefly, closest to projecting a “modernist” conception of language onto Lu Xun’s text, it is when he has just invoked Marsten Anderson’s pioneering work on Chinese realism. Having just noted Anderson’s book The Limits of Realism, Tang writes, At the origin of modern Chinese literature, the limits of realism are already spotted and underlined. To those limits a modernist reconceptualization of language is offered a solution.27

24 25 26 27

Jameson, Political Unconscious, 19. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 42. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 63. Tang, “Lu Xun’s ‘Diary,” 1231.

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As readers of Anderson’s book are well aware, Jameson’s modernist projection is the very methodological premise that Anderson carefully details in his introduction and that is at work throughout his study. In what follows, I would like to consider the consequences that projection poses for our understanding of the Chinese realism that emerges out of what Tang, Anderson, and Wang all deem realism’s dissolution in Lu Xun. My ultimate purpose is to suggest the way forward for a critical reading of the Chinese realist project that circumvents the kinds of conceptual roadblocks erected by too abrupt a diagnosis of Lu Xun’s own auto-deconstruction of what David Wang terms the “realist paradigm.” I hope then to avoid the conclusion that the realist literary movement and the theories of aesthetics upon which that movement sought to ground itself were forced to run almost purely on political fumes. On the contrary, this book argues that the project of Chinese realism became driven by an ever deeper engagement with the problem of the relationship between aesthetics and the Real—an engagement that was not nearly so naïve nor violative of semiotic truth as is sometimes presumed. Anderson announces very early in The Limits of Realism his theoretical investment in what becomes a recognizably Barthean hostility to the lisible of realism: Contemporary criticism, with its base in linguistic philosophy, has effectively undermined realism’s pretense that a literary text may constitute a direct representation of the material or social world: a work of fiction, readers are reminded, is a linguistic construct whose semiotic status must never be forgotten. More radical critics, regarding language as a closed system perpetuated by its own internal differences, throw into doubt even the notion of linguistic referentiality. Critical practices that once were standard in treating realist fiction now seem lamentably inadequate.28

In Anderson’s preliminary laying out of his methodological principles, one immediately senses the emergence of Jameson’s straw man. Chinese realism will be critically evaluated on the basis of the realist text’s (in)ability to fulfill aspirations imputed to it, namely its “pretense” to represent the (Lacanian) Real. And yet, Anderson does not indicate precisely where that aspiration is ever voiced by any of the writers he treats. The difficulty here is that by inflating the actual aspirations of realism’s earliest practitioners in the May Fourth period Anderson

28

Anderson, Limits of Realism, 4.

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holds early Chinese realism to a post-modernist standard by asking of it something it could never hope to achieve. There can be little doubt that Lu Xun and Ye Shaojun 叶绍钧 did take it for granted that their literary production was premised on a referential relation to a reality that existed beyond the texts they composed.29 My larger concern is that by implicitly attributing to these writers such immodest aspirations, largely on the basis of a very retroactive inference, we would remain unable to even register, much less comprehend the far less modest—though not purely or reductively political—ends the project of realist aesthetics in China would later embrace. Put another way we might ask, what literature could possibly come after this incipient realism that is in a state of both conceptual and practical implosion from its earliest, tentative, creative strivings in the work of Lu Xun? If Chinese realism was doomed from the outset, according to Anderson, it is because its very short-lived purpose was to register a May Fourth iconoclastic complaint against a moribund cultural tradition. That task complete, realism comes to outlive its usefulness and finds itself caught up in a literary variant of Freud’s repetition compulsion, mimetically reproducing/replicating the very oppressive social conditions it sought to shed critical light upon. As Anderson phrases it, “Realism, [Lu Xun] implies, risks making authors accomplices to the social cruelty they intend to decry.”30 This oft-quoted statement is probably best understood both in light of the rest of Anderson’s argument, as well as in light of Lu Xun’s own very complex relationship to the contemporary debates concerning the actual nature of realism that began to rage furiously in the late 1920s. Anderson’s conclusion regarding Lu Xun’s wariness about the moral impact of his own literary work is grounded in one of the most careful, sensitive and rewarding readings of Lu Xun’s work ever produced. Anderson is especially attentive to the peculiar intrusion of moments of emotional release for the “I” narrators that conclude such stories as “New Year’s Sacrifice,” “In the Wine Shop,” and the “Misanthrope.” As Anderson notes, these moments of catharsis are utterly “incongruous” 29 It is significant that Anderson only notes that “more radical critics” question the very possibility of referentiality, per se, since Anderson himself does not. His multiple references to “epistemology” partially presuppose his adoption of that position, and yet his essentially mimetic conclusion—namely that “the realist narrative, by imitating at a formal level the relation of oppressor to oppressed”—does not require it (Anderson, Limits of Realism, 91). 30 Anderson, Limits of Realism, 91.

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in relation to the tragic events that generally precede them. Anderson writes, The narrators have to varying extents been equated with Lu Xun himself, but the significant point of resemblance is their shared class status, which allows them access to the written language by which they can give a voice to “silent China.” This tool endows them with the power to narrate the life of other classes and thereby inscribe meaning on the social body as a whole. But because these narrators and their class have failed in this task of writing, the Chinese people are “like a great dish of loose sand.” Although readers share the emotional satisfaction expressed at the closure, their awareness of the narrator’s moral failure obstructs the story’s full cathartic effect and raises questions about the moral utility of such narratives.31

Like both Tang and Wang, Anderson’s groundbreaking analysis of early Chinese realism is animated in part by a certain incredulity toward the later Chinese literary bureaucratic appropriation of Lu Xun as the father of Chinese realism. As Xiaobing Tang has shown, we have very good reason to take seriously such incredulity. But what this passage above subtly reveals is an unintended repetition of precisely the official literary bureaucratic tendency to read Lu Xun’s stories as taking as their primary object of realist description China’s late-imperial rural subalterns. Especially “In the Wineshop” and “The Misanthrope” do not predominantly take the “oppressed” as their narrative subjects, since each story focuses much more on the kind of vacillating, impotent intellectual Anderson does such a brilliant job of analyzing. Consider, for example, the vast distance that separates Lu Xun’s actual story “New Year’s Sacrifice,” from Sang Hu’s 桑弧 1956 film adaptation of the story in which Lu Xun’s befuddled and craven narrator has disappeared entirely. What Anderson claims regarding 1920s realism, namely that it “had taken as protagonist the oppressed or cannibalized social victim—the object of a humanistic pity” far better describes Sang Hu’s socialist realist filmic appropriation of Lu Xun’s story. As Anderson himself notes, Lu Xun by 1928 had already begun to “internalize much of the criticism that was about to be directed against him” by the Creation society. Both Lu Xun and Mao Dun “agreed with the Creation and Sun societies that literature could be a tool of radical politics, and shared their opponents’ concern about the individualism fostered by

31

Anderson, Limits of Realism, 90.

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bourgeois realism.”32 In short, it was much less the limits of realism, as such, that Lu Xun recognized than his own limitations vis-à-vis the larger project of revolutionary realism that was still in the process of formation and that he fully endorsed. As such, given the course that realism would continue to take in China, Anderson grants a bit too much privilege to Lu Xun when he supplants Lu Xun’s clear sense of his own limitations as a revolutionary realist writer for the “limits of realism,” as such. For as Anderson’s study is so careful to note, Lu Xun’s engagement with revolutionary art, literature, and criticism—nearly all of which almost by definition could be deemed realist—would only deepen in the years prior to his death.33 It should be said, that what is so compelling about Anderson’s discussion of Lu Xun is its extraordinary sensitivity to the self-doubt so characteristic of Lu Xun’s “I” narrators. And yet accepting Anderson’s conclusions about the limits of Chinese realism means also accepting his description of the Western model of realism his Chinese writers take as their model. The privilege he grants to catharsis as central to the “operation of realism” is, however, not well accounted for in his discussion. By the same token, the one Aristotelian concept that necessarily figures as central to Western realism, both ancient and modern—what indeed the Chinese realist aesthetic project did in fact draw from Aristotle—namely, mimesis, is sidelined very early on by Anderson. Having just invoked the Barthean reduction of the real to an “effect of fiction,” Anderson writes, This perspective on the Real (whose emblematic rather than essentialist value I will signify through capitalization) frees us from a narrow consideration of the text’s relationship to the world (mimesis), allowing exploration as well of the creative generation of fiction (poiesis) and of its reception and its social use (which, we shall see, is best approached in the case of realism through the Aristotelian notion of catharsis).34

Anderson, Limits of Realism, 53. Anderson, Limits of Realism, 91. What is certainly true is that Lu Xun would never grant to realism, much less art as a whole, anything approaching the inflated, formative (if wholly negative) powers David Wang discovers in Lu Xun, as we will see below. As Lu Xun wrote in April of 1927, “the present situation in China is such that only actual revolutionary war counts. A poem could not have frightened away [the Jiangsu and Zhejiang warlord] Sun Chuanfang 孙传芳, but a cannon-shell scared him away. I know some people think literature has a great influence on the revolution, but personally I doubt this” (Lu Xun: Selected Works. Vol. II, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang [Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1985], 341). 34 Anderson, Limits of Realism, 8. 32

33

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At best, the very concept of mimesis is presented by Anderson as merely a key element of Western realism of little theoretical interest to early Chinese critical realists. Anderson quite accurately also points out that the problem of verisimilitude (Barthes’ vraisembable) aroused equally little concern. But if May Fourth realists show little critical interest in the problem of mimesis, they show even less for catharsis, though for the reason that the critical formation of a theory of realist aesthetics in China sought to comprehensively address a set of concerns quite unrelated to Aristotelian catharsis. Part of the difficulty is that Jauss’s conception of catharsis in Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics which Anderson invokes was meant to articulate a phenomenological concern for the problem of reception, rather than a constitutive feature of any theory of literary realism.35 More germane to the purposes of my argument in this chapter, turning the reader’s attention to the play of catharsis in Lu Xun has the effect of further distancing early Chinese realism from the course it would later take—one that would lead it into a very direct and complex encounter with Aristotelian mimesis. So if realism was destined to discover its limits very quickly in the May Fourth era, those limits are defined for Anderson as the morally corrosive effect of catharsis upon the realist author’s conception of her/ his work. In other words, it is very difficult not to agree with Anderson that Lu Xun probably found writing such tales as “In the Wineshop,” or “Misanthrope,” with their darkly self-reflective and ironic narrators, ultimately both demoralizing and incompatible with the larger critical mission that animated so much of his writing and activities after he stopped writing fiction. What is less certain is that this process of disillusionment with “realist” fictional creation indicates the limits of realism, whether Western or Chinese. For Chinese realism to reach its limits it must be distinguished from the Western model—what Anderson describes as the “true nature of realism.”36 As Anderson writes, Realism was not primarily endorsed by Chinese thinkers for what Westerners associate most closely with it, its mimetic pretense, that is, the simple desire to capture the real world in language.37

Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). 36 Anderson, Limits of Realism, 25. 37 Anderson, Limits of Realism, 37. 35

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But if the mimetic dimension is judged tangential to early Chinese realism, Aristotelian catharsis is equally so to Western theories of literary realism, especially ones Lu Xun might have had available to him. What is striking is this bracketing of mimesis out of the project of Chinese realism and the simultaneous privilege it grants to catharsis, since the quite deliberate emphasis upon mimesis in later Chinese aesthetic theory appears thereby wholly disconnected from May Fourth realism. Anderson takes the fact that the theoretical reflections on realism are largely absent at a time when the early realists are already producing (what they at least imagined to be) realist literature as indicative of the limits that would rapidly define it. That Lu Xun had steeped himself so fully in works of foreign fiction that he felt confident enough to produce the “Diary of a Madman” as the first modern (whether modernist or realist) Chinese short story, might be deemed extraordinary enough. To ask that Lu Xun in the 1920s also immerse himself in the theoretical discourse of realism to the degree that he would participate in that discourse probably asks more of even Lu Xun than he could muster. Totalization and Violence in Lu Xun’s “Master Discourse of Realism” While for Anderson the neglect of such fundamentally realist tenets as verisimilitude and mimesis suggests early Chinese realism’s broad divergence from the Western model, David Wang discovers in “Diary of a Madman,” what he terms the “ideological and epistemological conditions of realist discourse.”38 Indeed, Wang will do so not on the basis of any textual evidence that Lu Xun himself ever sought formally to establish such conditions, were it even possible to do so, but rather on the basis of his own reading of “Diary of a Madman.”39 His analysis produces charges against Lu Xun that are multiple and

38 David Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 7. 39 Given that the actual content of Lu Xun’s “realist discourse” is never clearly detailed, it is very difficult to imagine what those conditions might be anyway. The larger problem is the very notion of establishing “epistemological conditions” at all, since they can at best be discerned in the form of a critique of knowledge. The “Diary” poses very clearly a problem of knowledge, but it cannot be said to establish for China the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, as such. These latter are not the subject of human manipulation or fashioning in the same way one creates an artistic work, like a short story.

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devastating. It is worth treating each charge in succession in order to grasp the indictment as a whole, since Wang’s discussion culminates in one of the most remarkable claims about Lu Xun on record. More importantly, Wang’s highly critical treatment of Lu Xun is meant to serve as the centerpiece of what Wang understands as the true (mis-)origins and nature of Chinese realism. The judgment Wang renders against Lu Xun ties realism directly to 20th-century political violence in China. I will argue that the charges against Lu Xun cannot ultimately be sustained simply because the conception of realism Wang derives from the single text, “Diary of a Madman,” demands more of a literary text than we can fairly ask.40 My larger aim in what follows, however is to show that Wang’s reading of Lu Xun draws heavily on an unexamined romantic model, namely that of the late 18th-century German romantics. As I will show, if a somewhat diffuse coherence organizes Wang’s deployment of his literary-philosophical critical lexicon (subjectivity, ontology, self-consciousness), it is because his literary critical approach to “Diary of a Madman” testifies remarkably to what the Literary Absolute terms the “veritable romantic unconscious” that characterizes our literary modernity. Wang begins with the assertion that Lu Xun “deserves credit of envisioning a Chinese reality in crisis.”41 Given Wang’s later conflation of the author with one of the two narrators in “Diary of a Madman” (the paranoid diarist, rather than the narrator who presents the diary to the reader), Wang’s use of the term envision situates China’s supposed “crisis” squarely in the realm of Lu Xun’s creative imagination, the extra-literary status of China’s ongoing (geo-)political and cultural crises notwithstanding. Envisioning this crisis becomes the key feature 40 Wang’s use of the term enlightenment, like his use of the kindred terms, humanism, rationality, utopia, and, of course, revolution, is lacking in the kind of rich, if often grim, nuance one finds in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer’s Dialectic of Englightenment. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. S. Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). In the preface to the 1947 edition, the authors matter of factly acknowledge what Habermas terms the performative contradiction of affirming “that freedom in society is inseparable from Enlightenment thinking,” even as they write remorselessly about Enlightenment’s regressive degradation into myth in modern society (xvi). Habermas argues that Nietzsche plays a formative role in what he terms Horkeimer and Adorno’s “most nihilistic, blackest book.” Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), 106. As a careful reader of Nietzsche, Lu Xun, I strongly believe, is much closer to the bleak consciousness of modern rationality’s dangers, even as he affirms the emancipatory impulse of the Enlightenment. 41 Wang, Fictional Realism, 1.

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in the “discursive paradigm” Lu Xun is said to have established, one that later writers Lao She 老舍, Shen Congwen, etc. will assimilate and then revise. Wang is surely correct to assume that the extravagant “mythifications” he notes in his first paragraph are meant to serve “political uses,” but it is difficult not to conclude that Wang’s claim regarding Lu Xun’s demiurgic installation of the “discursive paradigm” of Chinese realism does not also end up serving just such a purpose in Wang’s text. As we shall see, exactly what this “discursive paradigm” is remains the subject of near constant ambiguity throughout the introduction. But given that the multiple realisms Mao Dun, Lao She, and Shen Congwen create are deemed “transgressions” of Lu Xun’s master paradigm, we need to make some effort to understand what that paradigm might actually entail.42 For Wang, Lu Xun’s project of literary realism is beset at the outset with a fundamental “paradox,” namely its calling “into question the real while at the same time re-essentializing the Real.”43 But it is not entirely clear at this very early point in Wang’s analysis of Lu Xun exactly what the terms “real” and “Real” refer to or in what theoretical register he is using them. The claim is further obscured by the fact that nothing in the text up until this point provides any indication of exactly how Lu Xun accomplishes his re-essentialization of the Real, nor is this “paradox” ever actually demonstrated by any example. It is merely asserted alongside a related claim that the realist movement provoked “old yearnings for ontology of the Real.”44 A belated nostalgia for the Real would seem much more the province of a weary, late 20th-century post-modernism, than the New Culture movement. For May Fourth intellectuals, a “yearning for the Real” was anything but some hoary remnant of the recent imperial past. Rather, aspirations to a critical, cognitive grasp of reality and its practical transformation, as one finds later in the early 1940s, lay claim to the most modern theoretical resources. Where in the writings of Lu Xun or his realist acolytes there is expressed a desire for “ontology of the Real” is never shown. Absent both a definition of the “Real” and textual evidence of its paradoxical presence in Lu Xun, it remains unclear what light is shed on Lu Xun’s foundational role in Chinese realism.

42 43 44

Wang, Fictional Realism, 1. Wang, Fictional Realism, 2. Wang, Fictional Realism, 2.

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What is genuinely paradoxical is that the reader’s suspicion that Wang’s invocation of the “Real” is meant to be understood in some fashion vaguely indebted to Frederic Jameson’s Marxist hermeneutical refashioning of Lacan’s “Real” is provisionally confirmed by Wang’s use of the term “political unconscious” several pages later. Lacan himself appears, as do the terms “imaginary” and “symbolic.” But therein lays the paradox, since it is difficult to imagine a contemporary theoretical discourse more at odds with the tenor, ethos, and goals of Wang’s book than the Marxist Jameson’s Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. This might explain the absence of any explanation of the Lacanian terminology used. It is crucial to recall what I noted above, namely that as Jameson himself reminds his readers, Lacan states clearly that the Real “resists symbolization absolutely.”45 Undaunted, Jameson appropriates Lacan’s Real, though for decisively Marxist ends. I quote LaCapra’s lapidary discussion of the problem. And his [ Jameson’s] conception of the imaginary, via Althusser, becomes the basis for a theory of ideology as that distorting but “indispensable mapping fantasy or narrative by which the individual subject invents a ‘lived’ relationship with the collective systems which otherwise by definition exclude him.” This Marxist ideology would complement a Marxist science employing symbolism that “designates the Real without claiming to coincide with it” and offers “the very theory of its own incapacity to signify fully as its credentials for transcending both Imaginary and Symbolic alike.” What it might conceivably mean to designate “that which resists symbolization absolutely” is not elucidated.46

In other words, if Lacan’s own Real bars absolutely the way to any form of symbolization, representation, narrativization—“realist” or otherwise— Jameson’s call for a thoroughgoing Marxist critical hermeneutic attempts to clear the way, provisionally and in a strictly limited, designative manner. But it is not clear in Wang’s case how he intends to assimilate Jameson’s appropriation and transformation of Lacan into a reading of modern Chinese realism in Lu Xun. This is not to say that the problem of the Real, properly defined, is not profoundly relevant to the project of realism in 20th-century China. As I will show in later Jameson, Political Unconscious, 35. LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 250. The quotations LaCapra includes in his discussion come from Jameson’s 1977 piece in Yale French Studies. Frederic Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale French Studies, no. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (1977), 338–395. 45 46

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chapters, the Real and the negativity it precipitates plays a central role in what would later become socialist realist aesthetics. And it did so because negativity was part and parcel of the conceptual parameters to which enlightenment intellectuals, including Liang Qichao 梁启超 Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培, and, of course, Lu Xun could all lay claim.47 All this is to say that David Wang and Marsten Anderson in his own way are both entirely correct to present the problem of the Real as ultimately a philosophical one for Chinese literary realism. The problem lies less with the fact that their discussions of the Real in the form each initially presents them are too attenuated to ever really be brought to bear on the texts they examine.48 What is most problematic about the claim that Lu Xun “re-essentializes the Real” is not that no textual evidence is provided that Lu Xun ever does so, even unintentionally, but that, ironically, the later project of Chinese realism struggled mightily, in both theory and practice, to do precisely that. In other words what Wang represents as the unintended and paradoxical consequence of Lu Xun’s enlightenment critique of what he clearly deemed was China’s moribund, feudal cultural tradition would become the active goal of aesthetic practice by the late 1930s and for very necessary historical reasons. I take this problem up in detail in the next chapter, where I show that Lu Xun’s assimilation of Western literary realism was but a very small part of a far vaster assimilation of that realism’s philosophical aesthetic presuppositions, and that as such, Lu Xun plays a vital role in the formation of the modern concept of literature in China. Precisely for this reason, accepting Wang’s request that the reader “understand realistic mimesis as a claim

47 What would have been familiar to Liang Qichao, Cai Yuanpei, and Lu Xun was the Kantian basis of the problem of the (Lacanian) Real in the “noumenal.” Cai’s neo-Kantian education in Leipzig is well known. See Liu Kang’s Aesthetics and Marxism. For Liang’s lengthy discussion of Kant, see his “The Doctrine of the First Philosopher of Modernity,” Liang Qichao zhexue sixiang lunwen xuan 梁启超哲学思想论文选 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1984), 151–169. For a discussion of Liang’s encounter with Kant, see Huang K’o-wu, “Liang Qichao and Immanuel Kant,” in The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Berkeley, Center for Chinese Studies, 2004), 125–155. For a careful analysis of the problem of Kant’s noumenon in relation to negativity, see Diana H. Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (London; New York: Routledge, 2000). 48 In Anderson, the Real drops rapidly from view once he turns to his writers. Each critic heavily frontloads his discussion with references to the “ontology of the Real” (Wang, Fictional Realism, 2) or “realist metaphysics” (Anderson, Limits of Realism, 17), terms whose critical import in their texts is in neither case clearly developed.

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to faithful reflection of the world’s objective surface” risks depriving us of an accurate understanding of what mimesis actually meant in the discourse of Chinese realism, since the essentialist orientation of what would in fact become the theory of realism in China repeatedly and forcefully abjured the surface in favor of inner essence. A difficulty emerges in the slippage that occurs continually between the registers of the R/real and realism as a literary project. The aforementioned “ontology of the Real” and Lu Xun’s “approach to reality” are straightaway assimilated to “19th-century European realism” and Lu Xun’s reworking of that tradition in “Diary of a Madman,” all of which then collectively inflate into Lu Xun’s “discursive paradigm” of realism. This totalizing gesture confounds Lu Xun’s obvious and very complex affiliation with modern Chinese enlightenment discourse—itself anything but uniform—whose ends were cultural critique with his very carefully conceived and deftly crafted modern literary practice, and each of those, finally, with what Wang pegs as a mindless, sloganeering politics (“Save the children!”) whose horrific effects we will see momentarily are, in David Wang’s reading, nothing short of hemaclysmic.49 In other words, the critical, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of Lu Xun’s thought blur together and balloon into a “master paradigm” whose most salient feature is naïve misrecognition of reality for the Real. 49 I would argue that the facile identification of Lu Xun with a generalized humanist discourse of enlightenment neglects the complex dimensions of Lu Xun’s thought. For David Wang, Lu Xun’s public espousal of enlightenment discourse is flatly contradicted by his occasional literary penchant for the “macabre” and the “irrational” (Wang, History, 276). I think Takeuchi Yoshimi much better captures what is actually at stake here: “The ‘most painful thing in life,’ awakening from a dream, occurs when the slave rejects his status as slave while at the same time rejecting the fantasy of liberation, so that be he becomes a slave who realizes he is a slave. This is the state in which one must follow a path even though there is no path to follow; or rather, one must follow a path precisely because there is no path to follow . . . This is the meaning of despair found in Lu Xun; it is what makes Lu Xun possible. Despair emerges in the resistance of following a path when there is no path, while resistance emerges as the activiation of despair . . . There is no room for humanism here.” With the kind of acute dialectical sensitivity one finds in Adorno, Takeuchi sees Lu Xun as embodying a rejection of the kind of humanist philosopher of liberation that often characterizes the CCP’s more critically naïve appropriations of “Lu Xun” the figure (Takeuchi Yoshimi, What is Modernity: Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans. Richard Calichman [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 43–82). See also Calichman’s compelling and nuanced discussion of Takeuchi in Takeuchi Yoshimi; Displacing the West. Cornell East Asia Series, no. 120 (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Program, 2004), and Naoki Sakai’s discussion in his essay “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,” Postmodernism and Japan, ed. M. Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 93–122.

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We are asked to believe that the aesthetic artifact “Diary of a Madman” embodies a full-blown worldview. Again, it is very much in line with the purpose of this book to show that indeed an aesthetic doctrine of realism would become in China something quite intimately connected to problems of “epistemology” and “ideology.” The point is simply that the process of forming that doctrine into a relatively coherent theory required formal recourse to an elaborate philosophical aesthetics. As such, the conceptual distance that separates Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” from Cai Yi’s New Theory of Art (Xinyishu lun 新艺术论) in 1940 is so vast that there can be no mistaking the modest gambit of Lu Xun’s short fiction for the more comprehensive conception of the art’s relationship to reality in Cai Yi. Wang writes, “He starts out with a declared intention to recapture and reform reality, but he can never provide a coherent meaning for the real without exposing the break between signifier and signified, between form and content. Realism is so practiced as to bring forth its self-contradiction: to name the real is to bring forth either transgression or denial of the Real.”50 The walls of Wang’s somewhat random proliferation of binaries close inexorably in on Lu Xun: the gap between “what the real should be and what the real is,” “the real as something immanent versus the real as something historically predetermined,”51 “[between] language as a fully functional medium reflecting the real versus language as an arbitrary closure conditioning the real and so on… between reality and vision/illusion, between realism and allegory.”52 It does not stop here. In the vise-grip of these flat and wooden oppositions, purged clean of any possible hope of mediation, one senses the air rapidly escaping from “carceral” confines of this logic. When we are told that Lu Xun’s story has succeeded in “drawing attention to the paradoxical condition of language and narrative in transmitting the real,”53 (5) it is not because “Diary of a Madman” has in any fashion, demonstrated by Wang, organized a critique of the conditions of linguistic intelligibility, Sausserian, Barthian, Derridian, or otherwise, least of all by Lu Xun himself “intentionally” as the result of his theoretical acumen. Rather, it is merely because of the stylistic difference between classical and vernacular Chinese prose. 50 51 52 53

Wang, Wang, Wang, Wang,

Fictional Fictional Fictional Fictional

Realism, Realism, Realism, Realism,

3. 9. 9 (italics mine). 5.

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But nothing in Lu Xun’s narrative disqualifies classical Chinese from contact with the real, since neither a written style of language, nor language as such is ever posited in the tale by either narrator as either possessing or lacking any “direct contact with real.”54 Of course, for Lu Xun the choice of the vernacular language is strategic and political. The Madman’s diary entries are ravings, pure and simple, which nonetheless, and despite their manifestly lunatic content, carry also for us, Lu Xun’s readers, an allegorical load. But in Wang’s reading, this is not at all certain. When the Madman expresses himself in vernacular idioms and western sentence patterns, as opposed to the ornate classical Chinese that frames his diary, he articulates problems of communication and of representation. For him, signifier and signified, the world he sees and the world he is supposed to see do not coalesce any more, and the diary desperately tries to name the real by means of a discourse which is not (yet) authenticated by his society.55

The semiotic analytical distinction between signifier and signified is one that obtains by definition for language as such, not just for Lu Xun’s Madman and Lu Xun himself. But the semiotic problem of the relation between signifier and signified is immediately substantialized into a problem of referentiality. The Diary does not try to “name the real” with recalcitrant signs; it merely presents a fictional, paranoid pseudotheory regarding the “truth” of 4,000 years of Chinese civilization. That this lunatic vision is composed in signs known conventionally as Chinese characters, which are themselves arbitrary combinations of signifiers and signifieds, is merely the condition of linguistic signification as such, and has no bearing on the sanity or insanity of the Madman’s discourse. No one, save the Madman himself, believes what the Madman says—not the most obscurantist Neo-Confucian of Lu Xun’s ideological enemies, nor especially the sympathetic partisans among Lu Xun’s New Youth readership. For all readers, the title of the story and the first narrator’s claims about the diarist are justified entirely by a reading of the contents of the diary itself. Try as one might, no reading of the story is ever likely to restore the Madman to psychological equilibrium. It is only because the text avails itself so readily of an allegorical reading that disputes regarding the interpretation of that allegory are

54 55

Wang, Fictional Realism, 5. Wang, Fictional Realism, 5.

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possible in the first place. In other words, the most bitter of “ideological” disputes regarding the “truth” of what the allegory might be said to figure—namely China’s moral and spiritual degradation at the turn of the century—are possible precisely because a politically diverse set of readers can share a unanimous consensus that the diary in the story was indeed penned by a man suffering terribly from paranoid delusions. Whatever allegorical meaning one might seek to align the story with, one could never succeed in erasing the purely figurative status of the Madman’s beliefs. Which means we are free to read the diary naively or even accidentally as an actual clinical manifestation of a late-imperial, Chinese paranoid schizophrenic, who might then be justifiably deemed a fit subject for “medical research” ( yi gong yijia yanjiu 以供医家研究). But to approach the text as an allegory requires that we are not free to arbitrarily disregard the inherent limits of its figurative dimension. All this is to say that one could never be justified in ascribing to “Diary of a Madman” a literal belief on the part of its author, Lu Xun. For Wang, if the “Diary” is in some fashion allegorical, it is not an actual allegory about China but rather about Lu Xun himself. Wang writes, “Seen in this light, ‘Diary of a Madman’ can be taken as an allegory of how we narrate in order to define and/or defy the rational and the real.”56 But Wang’s problematic identification of the writer Lu Xun with the “Madman” means simply that what is figuratively represented by the “Diary” is Lu Xun’s own failure to narrate the real. Wang’s claim that the “symptoms of madness described in ‘Diary of a Madman’ . . . thus call for more than psychiatiric interpretation”57 is not meant to exclude the psychological from his account of the story. For Wang, the diarist’s rantings figure not China’s corrupt feudal ethics, but rather Lu Xun’s unconscious awareness of his own failure to “capture the real” in language. Such a reading can only be sustained by the immediate identification of Lu Xun the writer with his lunatic literary character. Wang writes, “Lu Xun’s obsession with the validity of voice is indicated by the title of his short story collection, Nahan 呐喊 (A Call to Arms). ‘Diary of a Madman’ can be read as an exposé of the predicament of speaking out in a society which refuses to listen.”58

56 57 58

Wang, Fictional Realism, 7. Wang, Fictional Realism, 7. Wang, Fictional Realism, 6.

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What is surprising is that given the semiotic/structuralist premises regarding signification that Wang uses to critique Lu Xun’s “realism,” he would attempt to deduce the biographical Lu Xun’s psychological condition on the basis of a short story. The larger problem is that the psycho-biographical reading would have to first acknowledge and account for Lu Xun’s explicit statements in the preface regarding why “calling out” posed a problem for him in the first place. One would have to show that when Lu Xun writes that “the real tragedy was of [one] to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response,” it is only to raise the same issue of “shouting out” (da rangqilai 大嚷起来) again later in the text, but then as a means to address the far more complex issue regarding the nature of human hope. What is troubling is that a poststructuralist semiotic theory of the sign is affirmed only to the degree that it might reveal some irrevocable contradiction in the “discursive paradigm” of Lu Xun’s realist project. The break between “signifier and signified” is meaningful only to this very limited degree. The very poststructuralist theory of the sign that Wang invokes by definition precludes the kind of reconstruction of a biographical author’s psychological condition on the basis of a literary text he attempts with Lu Xun. In precisely the same way, the flat conflation of the same biographical author with one of the narrators in his fiction violates the most basic premise of the kind of narratological reading Wang aligns himself with via Genette. According to Wang’s reading, “The Diary of a Madman” should be understood as the sublimated, monological textual expression of “the Madman’s (Lu Xun’s) voice tak[ing] an inward turn in the form of a diary. Muted by external reality, the Madman can only address himself. Or more poignantly, why write a story about the gratuitousness of speech?”59 Perhaps the question is what would warrant the assertion that the story is about the utter superfluity of communication? Certainly not the surprising conflation of Lu Xun’s very public 1918 act of penning a short story for a hip, new progressive journal with the literary subject of that short story—a madman. Nor the preface to the collection in which that story later re-appeared some four years later and in which Lu Xun states clearly that his decision to “write something” (zuo dian wenzhang 做点文章) for New Youth was necessitated by the simple acknowledgement that intellectual honesty precluded the

59

Wang, Fictional Realism, 6.

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possibility of writing off (mosha 抹杀) hope, “since hope belonged to the future”—which would also be to say, hope was not his to squander because it is never one’s possession. How Lu Xun’s decision to publish his first modern short story, which Wang argues “stands as an allegory of the way modern Chinese realism came into existence,” constitutes a turning inward of Lu Xun’s “voice” is unclear. It is when Wang attempts finally to uncover the full measure of the realist paradigm’s effective payload that his argument becomes most difficult to sustain. As I will show, this is simply because he asks of Lu Xun’s literary gem infinitely more than any short story could ever hope to provide. Wang claims that the story’s classical Chinese frame “indicates [that] the nomination and exclusion of the mad and irrational makes possible a society’s differentiation of the object from the subject, the conscious from the unconscious and the real from the unreal. By contrast, the center of the story [the Madman’s diary] triggers a vertiginous interplay between madness and rationality, illusion and reality.”60 The madman’s text is uniformly and manifestly delusional from beginning to end61 and the first narrator’s designation of it as such provokes not the slightest vertigo as we read, since our reading cannot help but confirm his diagnosis. That we may also be willing to entertain the text’s figurative dimension which points to some “reality” beyond the text requires little in the way of dizzying conceptual gymnastics. What Wang wishes to capture here are the “ideological and epistemological conditions of realist discourse.” But it could never be a “society’s” “nomination and exclusion of the mad and irrational” that makes possible its ability to distinguish “the object from the subject.” Nor especially could one modern writer’s short story furnish the transcendental grounds for human subjects, individual or collective, sane or mad, to recognize objects. Pushing “Lu Xun’s narrative strategy to an extreme” does not authorize us to “conclude that any effort to validate meaning in a realist discourse can claim at best a partial or transitory victory.” Indeed, it is the “extreme” and arbitrary Wang, Fictional Realism, 7. The ellipsis that ends the story does not mark the return of “silence.” It marks the moment in the text where the delusional discourse ends and hence where the madman’s return to sanity, “reality,” and the social begins, as the first narrator has already told us. It is the madman himself who, once recovered, names his own discourse (“至於書名, 則本人愈後所提,” LXQJ 1: 422). Indeed, even for readers given to an allegorical reading of the madman’s diary ravings, it is hard not to feel genuine relief on his behalf. 60 61

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conflation of Lu Xun’s “critical position” with his fictional Madman’s all too fragile grip on reality that calls into question Wang’s conclusions about Lu Xun’s “realist paradigm.” Lu Xun’s figurative use of madness in the “Diary” may lead us in a host of important interpretive directions, but not to the “ideological and epistemological conditions of realist discourse.”62 Since what those conditions might actually be are never detailed and explained, it is very difficult to know what they might be, save that (linguistic) signs are purely conventional and no combination of them could ever hope to fully “capture the real.” More difficult to understand is the purpose of projecting this anti-essentialist bit of poststructuralist wisdom as the flawed content of Lu Xun’s “master paradigm” of realism. Given the simply extraordinary claims regarding the “realist paradigm” Wang attributes to Lu Xun’s short story, one might imagine that some credit would accrue to Lu Xun, the writer. Indeed, had Lu Xun managed to accomplish with his literary output not only the successful literary assimilation of European realism but as well the theoretical elaboration of its “ideological and epistemological conditions,” one could only imagine Lu Xun worthy of praise even more lavish than his most ardent Cultural Revolution idolators. Why Wang remains so parsimonious in his praise of Lu Xun’s apparent accomplishment only becomes clear when the lunatic diarist is quite justifiably charged with “submit[ing] history to a new totalization.”63 While one could only agree that the Madman’s vision of Chinese civilization as a “banquet of cannibalism” is totalistic, it is only with the proviso that this is precisely what makes it so obviously “paranoid.”64 It is exactly here that Wang’s argument registers another conceptual slippage, though this time with devastating results. The very oscillation between “realism and allegory” that David Wang claims the “Diary” “testif[ies] to,” comes to the most abrupt halt. No longer allegorical in any sense, the Madman’s delusions become suddenly transmogrified and then frozen into Lu Xun’s realist description of Chinese history. As the actual (and now only) “content”

62 Even if one could find any actual textual evidence that Lu Xun ever took such a task seriously, the simple fact remains that the many theorists after him who took that task very seriously never looked to the “Diary” for an elaboration of the epistemological tenets that would ground “realist (literary) discourse.” 63 Wang, Fictional Realism, 9. 64 Though certainly not, strictly speaking, totalitarian, a term I hasten to add, Wang does not use, though given what he says of Lu Xun one has to wonder why not.

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of the short story, “cannibalism [becomes] the new myth he65 develops to explain four thousand years of Chinese history.”66 But in fairness to the fictional Madman and to “traditional Chinese rationality,” paranoid totalization is merely the symptom of his deranged psychological condition. Eviscerating the text of its obvious allegorical significance would compel Lu Xun’s reader to censor any thought of the story’s figurative dimension and that they “read” it in the most literal and “realist” fashion imaginable. Quite suddenly the undecidibilities, indeterminacies, and aporias we have been led to believe constitute the essence of the “realist paradigm” the “Diary” is said to inaugurate disappear, and we are left with Lu Xun’s (Madman’s) “realist” portrait of Chinese people as “cannibals.” That such a reading violates the most fundamental practices (not to say ethics) of reading, especially literary, texts should be clear. By definition, no realist short story of Chinese cannibalism in the Madman’s totalized, lunatic conception of it could ever be written for the simple reason that it is a widely known fact that Chinese people do not and have never customarily devoured one another, least of all in the observance of what Lu Xun believed to be (legitimately or not) the dehumanizing ethical dictates of late-imperial, Neo-Confucian ritual. But Wang’s stunning reification of the vehicle of Lu Xun’s extended metaphor pales in comparison to the charges against Lu Xun the writer that immediately follow. Allegory emends the horror of cannibalism, but it does not repair the absurdity of totalism. The madman’s [/Lu Xun’s] mythology calls for the counterpart of the cannibal. Modern Chinese history has born witness to the way the Madman’s final outcry, “save the children,” can be realized in the most ironic and brutal ways. Despite his suspicion of children’s equal complicity in cannibalistic Chinese history, Lu Xun inspires his followers to allegorize the children and the reality promised to the children at the madman’s [ Lu Xun’s] incipient call. Lu Xun’s radical hermeneutic courts a radical solution in historical/political praxis. In order to save a generation of Chinese children, millions of Chinese children would have to die for the Revolution; and in order to save China again, millions

65 Confirmation of the reader’s suspicion that Lu Xun and his fictional Madman are fused into a single entity and that the fictional lunatic vision of the latter is the actual intellectual content of former’s “enlightenment” thought is not long in coming. “Despite his suspicion of children’s equal complicity in cannibalistic Chinese history, Lu Xun inspires his followers to allegorize the children and the reality promised to the children at the madman’s incipient call” (Wang, Fictional Realism, 9, emphasis added). I discuss this troubling claim below. 66 Wang, Fictional Realism, 9.

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of Red Guard children would know how to brutalize their parents and themselves.67

The reading of this indictment is genuinely vertiginous, as searching for a solid anchor that would moor our understanding of the above paragraph is very difficult. Lu Xun’s use of allegory (the very literary device that has not a moment prior been summarily excised from the story) is said to emend (correct, improve) Lu Xun’s true realist text of the actual Chinese “history of cannibalism.” How, or perhaps, why? In order to soften the devastating psychological blow for Lu Xun’s “New Youth” readers of Lu Xun’s/the Madman’s(?) discovery of the reality of “actual existing” Chinese cannibalism? But at this moment in Wang’s argument we should pause to take stock of the fact that we are standing on the very precipice of the reality of all the Chinese history that was to follow in the wake and, we are told, as the necessary consequence of the writing and publication of Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman.” The madman(/Lu Xun)’s mythology summons forth what Wang asks us to understand as actual, flesh and blood “cannibals,” who as the now real “counterpart(s)” to the fictional madman’s fictional/delusional myth are set loose remorselessly upon “millions of Chinese children.” The transition between David Wang’s own “radical hermeneutic” and the summary judgment he hands down on upon 20th-century Chinese history and Lu Xun’s role in the slaughter of countless innocents is jarring. In short, if Lu Xun benightedly failed to grasp the sheer futility of his realist literary efforts to describe the Real, he succeeds nonetheless as demiurge in the most extreme poeitic “writing” of China’s subsequent historical reality. By means of what metaphysical operation the delusional fictional world of Lu Xun’s lunatic is able to engender effectively the reality of actual “[m]odern Chinese history” is never declared.68 But we arrive, we are told, in “modern Wang, Fictional Realism, 9–10. “Diary of a Madman,” could never be mistaken for “hate speech” in the strict sense of a deliberate incitement to violence, nor could any of the rest of Lu Xun’s literary corpus. It is likewise inconceivable that the May Fourth-era readership of “Diary of a Madman” would have fallen collectively prey to the mass delusion that the madman’s encrypted plea “Save the children” programmed them to kill. For a very careful and precise analysis of “hate speech” see Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997). It goes without saying that fictional utterances such as “Save the children!” or “Kill the landlord!” in literary works, however we may wish to invest them with meaning, are not performative speech. “[T]he ways in which the body appears in speech is, of necessity, different from the way it appears in writing . . . The speech act, however, is performed bodily, and though it does not instate the absolute 67 68

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Chinese history” where we discover to our horror that the call to “save the children” can be (and for Wang, clearly was) “realized in the most ironic and brutal way.” And worse still (at least for Lu Xun), gazing upon this all too real carnage we are told to find the “Diary’s” author “inspir[ing] his followers” to perform a most uncanny ceremony/ritual, namely “allegoriz[ing] the children and the reality [emphasis added] promised by the madman’s incipient call.” Knowing exactly what “allegorizing children” means figuratively here (sacrificing, devouring, slaughtering them) even as we remain mystified as to what “allegorizing [actual, historical, Chinese] children” could ever possibly mean within the dimensions of actual, lived historical and political practice Wang here invokes might very well induce in his reader the most giddy of vertiginous affects, were it not that this extraordinary claim is one Wang asks us to entertain about what is, after all, a work of “literature.” No longer a literary act, “allegorizing” human beings parallels the “radical [final?] solution in [revolutionary?] historical/political praxis” Lu Xun’s demonic literary “hermeneutic” is said to summon forth. But in order for this genuinely totalizing translation/communication of the “myth” into effective historical reality to take place, the meaning of the mad diarist’s crazed call (nahan) must be subjected to yet another tropological operation that both inverts and warps the sense of the “slogan” “save the children” into “slaughter the children in the name of . . .” Unlike the conventional literary operation of a realist allegory in which an element of social reality is figured in terms of something else, Lu Xun’s realism functions by means of the transmogrification of what is figured in the allegory of the “myth,” namely cannibalism, into the lived “historical/political” reality of 20th-century China. Thus, the trouble with Lu Xun’s “master paradigm” of realism, it turns out, has nothing to do with the failure of his literature to ever truly reach and encompass the Real, but rather its ungodly power to become the historical Real itself.

or immediate presence of the body, the simultaneity of the production and delivery of the expression communicates not merely what is said, but the bearing of the body as the rhetorical instrument of expression” (Butler, Excitable Speech, 152).

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The Dystopian Chinese Literary Absolute Wang’s reading of “Diary of a Madman” results in a curious projection onto both the biographical figure of Lu Xun and his short story of a modern Chinese utopian, enlightenment faith in the social role of art realized horrifically as totalitarian slaughter. Liang Qichao’s belief in a Bildung derived from literature or what Wang describes as Liang’s faith in the “incredible power of [fiction] over the Chinese mentality”69 takes on truly demonic proportions with Lu Xun in Wang’s treatment. As we will see shortly, what is most surprising about this reading is that it affirms a degree of causality between Lu Xun’s short story and its subsequent social and political impact on 20th-century Chinese history that vastly exceeds anything even the CCP’s literary bureaucrats could have ever imagined for the role of art in modern Chinese society. As such, Wang’s treatment of “Diary of a Madman” serves to illustrate in remarkable fashion some of the most profound anxieties that beset North American studies of modern Chinese literature’s troubled course through 20th-century Chinese history. In order to map out some of the larger issues concerning Chinese literary modernity, I will briefly use the occasion of Wang’s reading of “Diary of a Madman” as a way to explore in more careful detail the problem of the “literary absolute.” This issue, as formulated in Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s book of the same name, is not only a key feature of literary modernity. Much more remarkably, the elucidation of this concept is essential to understanding Wang’s treatment of Lu Xun. In short, the premise that will guide my discussion in the following pages is that Wang participates in what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe have diagnosed as the “literary absolute’s” capacity to “aggravate and radicalize the thinking of totality and the Subject.”70 I will shortly clarify precisely what I mean by those terms, since they are profoundly relevant to the rest of the book. There will be no possibility of mistaking the Jena Romantics’ pursuit of Schelling’s “System-programme” for Wang’s devastating indictment of Lu Xun above. Despite the vast difference that separates the two, I will show that Wang’s analysis of Lu Xun reveals the most remarkable debt to the project of Romantic literary criticism.

69 70

Wang, Fictional Realism, 2. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 15.

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To an even greater degree than Marsten Anderson, Wang’s analysis draws heavily on a modern philosophical lexicon (i.e., subjectivity, self-consciousness, “systems of knowledge,” ontology, epistemology, and totality), and we could do worse than to begin our elucidation of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthes’ concept of the literary absolute with Wang’s analysis. But it is less these literary/philosophical critical terms themselves than the way they are arrayed in Wang’s analysis of Lu Xun that most clearly echoes the Jena Romantics’ installation of modern literature in a decisive relationship to philosophy. As we have seen, for Wang Lu Xun’s literary practice is irrevocably bound up with not only knowledge of “truth and reality” but also with “historical/political praxis.” Wang attributes to Lu Xun’s literary act of writing “Diary of a Madman” the formation of nothing less than the “ideological and epistemological conditions” of realism and in doing so, invests Lu Xun’s literary practice with a philosophical import for modern China no less ambitious than that of brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel and their colleagues in Jena, between 1798 and 1800. How, then, did the Jena Romantics understand the relationship between art and philosophy? In his discussion of Nancy and LacoueLabarthe’s Literary Absolute, Daniel Hoolsema addresses this problem as follows: For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, the way to begin to understand Romanticism is to see the Jena circle as acting on an aggravated desire to complete the subject that Kant bequeaths them. “Complete” here means: in art . . . the Romantics would successfully figure an aesthetic or sensible presentation of the concept of the subject and thereby accomplish its own self-comprehension. “This entire movement,” the authors write, “clearly presupposes . . . a conversion of the Kantian subject . . . into the ideal of a subject absolutely free and thereby conscious of itself ” (LA33/AL48). Rendered intuitable in the substantial medium of art, what they call the “system-subject” would be able to apprehend a Darstellung of its utmost desideratum: the concept of its own freedom.71

It will help to unpack this brief summary by noting first that Kant had clearly shown in the Critique of Pure Reason that the subject’s knowledge of itself was limited to only “sensible intuitions,” which comprise the

71 Daniel J. Hoolsema, “The Echo of an Impossible Future in The Literary Absolute,” MLN 119, no. 4 (September 2004), 850.

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content of the determinate, empirical ego.72 The true essence of the subject’s being is freedom. But because freedom itself can never be an object of cognitive experience, the subject must therefore remain forever “unrepresentable to itself.” For in Kant’s critical system, freedom is an idea of reason that, like God and immortality, is hence “inscrutable to us [and] a mystery, since it is not given to us in cognition.”73 In Kant’s second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, “[the subject] is posited as freedom, and freedom is the locus of self-consciousness.”74 It is Kant’s Third Critique, the Critique of Judgment, which seems to present the Jena Romantics a possible resolution to the crisis of a free subject constitutionally incapable of ever “achieving full consciousness of the idea of itself (freedom) . . . namely, through the presentation [Darstellung] of that idea in the sensible form of the beautiful, that is, in art.”75 What is crucial for our immediate purposes is that this problem of presentation of the philosophical idea of freedom (as the essence of the subject’s being) in the medium of art is linked in Romanticism directly to Bildung or what David Wang describes as follows: Both rhetorically and conceptually, a renovated narrative paradigm was regarded as the prerequisite for reflecting and rectifying reality (emphasis added). This mode of thinking is evinced by Liang Qichao’s propagation of fiction as possessing an incredible power over the Chinese mentality; by Chen Duxiu’s hyperbolic manifestos of literary modernization in the magazine New Youth; by Hu Shi’s proposals to “revolutionize” literature; and by Lu Xun’s powerful confession that he wanted to save the minds of the Chinese people before their bodies.76

72 Heidegger clarifes the relationship between the “pure ego” and the “determinate, empirical ego” as follows: “Kant makes a distinction between pure self-consciousness and empirical self-consciousness or, as he puts it, between the ego of apperception and the ego of apprehension . . . The pure ego, the ego of self-consciousness, of transcendental apperception, is not a fact of experience; in all empirical experiencing, I am already conscious of this [pure] ego as ‘I experience,’ the ontological ground of possibility of all experiencing” (Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. and ed. Albert Hofstadter [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988], 129). 73 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 140. As Kant phrases it in his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, although freedom cannot be an object of empirical observation, we can at least “think” it. “But though I cannot know, I can yet think freedom (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillian and Company, 1933), 28, emphasis in original).” 74 Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Literary Absolute, 31. 75 Hoolsema, “The Echo of an Impossible Future,” 849. 76 Wang, Fictional Realism, 2.

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As I will detail in the following chapter, Wang’s description of Lu Xun is fundamentally correct in that it identifies the problem of the Chinese mind (or soul) as the paramount concern of Chinese literary modernity. What I would like to draw attention to here is the fact that each of the figures Wang addresses did indeed fully endorse the formative role of literature and art in the refashioning of the modern Chinese subject. But it is essential that I clarify precisely what the very notion of the subject’s formation (Bildung) entails in its relationship to both literature and education, or simply, aesthetic education as the predominant feature of the New Culture Movement.77 First, the essential plasticity that characterizes the subject’s capacity to form itself is modeled, like the work of art, on the “autoproductivity of nature.” Redfield quotes Hans Georg Gadamer on this crucial point. It is not accidental that . . . the word Bildung resembles Greek physis. Like nature, Bildung has no goals outside itself . . . It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being.78

In German Romanticism, what we now customarily understand as the modern, “self-conscious” literary text is essentially autoproductive and thus mirrors nature’s own autoproductivity.79 As such, the literary work offers the subject the model (Vorbild ) of its own development. I will have more to say about this problem of Bildung in the chapters that follow. For the time being I want only to note that it is this larger sense of Bildung that animates Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and Lu Xun’s convictions regarding the human formative potential of the artistic and literary work.80 My concern here, however, is how an aggravation of this logic shapes Wang’s own reading of Lu Xun. Where the Jena Romantics discover in the literary work a reflection of the very principle that governs the modern subject’s formation, Wang finds in “Diary of a Madman” not only the “master paradigm” for

Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism, 29. Quoted in Marc Redfield, “Romanticism, Bildung, and the Literary Absolute,” Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 45. 79 As we will see in a moment, Wang’s reading of “Diary of a Madman” is not only fully “self-conscious.” In a sense that vastly exceeds anything affirmed by the Jena Romantics, it is radically autopoeitic both of the “subject” and its “direct corollary,” the historical and political world of 20th-century China that subject/Lu Xun brings into being. 80 For an excellent discussion of this issue of aesthetic education in the first two decades of the 20th-century in China, see Liu Kang’s Aesthetic Marxism. 77 78

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Chinese realism as such, but the actual historical and practical matrix of Chinese “utopian” revolutionary violence. What David Wang terms Lu Xun’s “mythology of cannibalism” realizes in grotesquely disfigured form what Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel in the “Earliest SystemProgramme of German Idealism” sought under the name of a “new mythology of reason.”81 The authors of The Literary Absolute begin their study with a careful reading of this two-page “System-Programme” itself, since it “is especially well suited to indicate the direction romanticism will choose to take as it sets out.”82 I call attention to this text in particular, since the radical “historical/practical” effectivity Wang asserts for “Diary of a Madman” ventriloquates the System-Programme’s affirmation of the “System-subject’s” own formidable effectivity: “With the free self-conscious being a whole world emerges at the same time—out of nothing—the only true and thinkable creation out of nothing —.”83 David Roberts and Peter Murphy gloss the text’s meaning as follows: The [System-Programme] is a text of extraordinary density, which envisages the unification of the moral, physical and historical worlds in the idea of freedom. The transformation of thought into reality, and metaphysics into ethics, calls for the construction of a system of ideas that involves at the same time the construction of the world as an act of absolute freedom (emphasis added).84

Of course for Schelling and his collaborators Hölderlin and Hegel, the Programme was but that, something to be taken up by the contributors to the journal Athenaeum in Jena as a project to be worked toward with extraordinary intensity until they abruptly abandon it. Though their furious efforts were short-lived, lasting all but two years, their legacy would come to powerfully shape much that we (post-)moderns understand as the relationship between literature and literary theory and

81 “First of all I shall speak here of an Idea which, as far as I know, has never occurred to anyone—we must have a new mythology, but this mythology must be in the service of Ideas, it must become a mythology of reason” (appendix: ‘The so called Oldest System Programme of German Idealism’ ” in Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, ed. Andrew Bowie [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003], 334–335). Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe believe Schelling to be the likely author, though the version that comes down to us was initially penned in Hegel’s hand. 82 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 32. 83 Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 334, emphasis in the original. 84 David Roberts and Peter Murphy, Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernity (London: Continuum, 2004), 21.

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criticism, as well as the modern institution of literary pedagogy. But that also means that the “new mythology of reason” capable of summoning forth into being a whole world as the direct corollary of the “system-subject’s” absolute freedom was, simply put, never realized.85 By the very same token, neither Wang, nor does Lu Xun or even Chinese literary modernity as such, realize in comparably metaphysical form some vast mega-sanguinary deformation of that project as modern Chinese history. It goes without saying that something of this radicalized mythopoetic aspiration would exert a deep and abiding influence on practically everything we now customarily associate with utopian thought in the complex weave of literature and politics in modern China, and for reasons that are perfectly understandable. Lu Xun’s 1908 essay “On the Power of Mara Poetry” is but the most obvious early example in this immediate context.86 What is most remarkable about David Wang’s conclusion about Lu Xun and his responsibility for revolutionary violence in modern Chinese history is that it repeats in radically inverted form the Romantic aspiration, par excellence, namely the ascription of genuinely—though in Wang’s case, monstrously—poetic powers to a literary text.87 Alison Bailey is certainly correct to wonder at the clearly implied causal relationship Wang asserts between the emergence of modern Chinese literature and violence in his more recent work, The Monster that is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in TwentiethCentury China. She makes also the very compelling point that to bear

85 Or as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe phrase it, “The [System-Programme] makes the world itself into a corollary of the subject. This gesture would be in complete conformity with Kant if only this subject, once again, were not the free subject itself, and consequently, if only the world were not posited here as creation, as the subject’s work—or, in other words, as a world organized in terms of absolute freedom, and therefore of morality (by the simultaneous effect of a fulfillment and a perversion of Kantian teleology (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute, 32, emphasis added). 86 “Moluo shi li shuo 摩羅詩力說,” (“On the Power of Mara Poetry”), LXQJI, 1: 63–116. For a careful analysis of this essay in relation to the problem of aesthetics see, Wang Ban, Sublime Figure of History, 60–66. 87 One has to conclude that like so many of us David Wang does this quite unconsciously, since there is nothing at all to suggest in any of his work an engagement with or reading of early German Romanticism: “[O]ne might ask: how many people, even among the best intentioned, are repeating Jena today—because they have not been able to read it” (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute, 13).

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literary witness to historical atrocity entails an ethical complexity for both writer and reader alike, not well accounted for in Wang’s book.88 The purpose of the rest of this book is to show not only the exact extent to which realism and then socialist realism would take up explicitly utopian aspiriations, but also and much more importantly the precise ways this is the case. But neither in Cai Yi’s Marxist philosophical aesthetics nor in the two socialist realist novels I later analyze in detail does one find anything approximating the extravagant (de-)formative powers Wang claims to have discovered in China’s literary modernity. In the more systematically articulated sense of realism at work in Cai Yi’s aesthetics, we encounter, as well, moments in which the modern “system-subject” of literary modernity is radicalized and aggravated, though in ways that differ fundamentally from Wang’s. My interest in socialist realist literature thus also lies in showing how what I have detailed above as the literary absolute powerfully shapes Song of Youth and Red Crag as modern Chinese Bildungsroman(e). In this chapter I have argued that Tang, Anderson, and Wang each stage a confrontation between May Fourth-era Chinese realism and poststructuralism’s random play of the signifier. But they share as well a conviction that the fate of Chinese realism can be best understood through the figure of Lu Xun and the way his literary work presages realism’s ultimate failure to succeed in realizing its ambitions. What is surprising is that despite these fundamentally similar strategies of reading Chinese realism and Lu Xun’s relation to Chinese realism, the conclusions differ remarkably. Tang most fully realizes the successes of this strategy through his deft extrication of Lu Xun from the dense and confining fabric of the Party’s bureaucratic appropriation/submission

88 Alison Bailey quite rightly asks, “Is violence, as Wang at one point rather oddly suggests (10), something that arrives in tandem with modern Chinese literature and modernity, or has it always been with us?” The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China, by David Der-wei Wang. Reviewed by C. D. Alison Bailey. Review http://mclc.osu.edu/rc /pubs /reviews/bailey.htm (accessed July 16, 2008) Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (Summer 2006). In that work, David Wang claims also that Lu Xun’s writing (the Preface to Call to Arms, “The True Story of Ah Q ,” etc.) “reveals [his] secret alliance with the cannibalistic audience.” (Wang, History, 23). Bailey requests as well a minimum of literary critical nuance in interpreting the scenes of violence in Lu Xun (and the rest of modern Chinese literature) in what are, after all, literary texts. “Nonetheless, it would have helped to have a clearer formulation of what violence means on the basic levels of injury, pain, and power dynamics, and how literary representations of violence can work to disgust, titillate, or awaken readers, as well as instigate further violence (Bailey, Review, 2008).”

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of Lu Xun to the official doctrine of literary realism. Tang’s highly provocative rereading of Lu Xun as Chinese modernist discovers in the “Diary of a Madman” not the foundational ur-text of modern Chinese realism, but a powerful critical impulse figured as kuang. As Tang shows, this impulse is as relentlessly antagonistic to a moribund, late-imperial feudal ethics as it is to the very same “officially sanctioned reductive literary criticism” that neutralized this critical power in the first place through its embalming of the figure of Lu Xun as “revolutionary realist.” But my interest in all three critics lies in the degree to which their respective treatments of Lu Xun make difficult the way forward from Lu Xun to a more comprehensive understanding of the realist literary doctrine Lu Xun himself would later in his life embrace. In other words, in what ways do the works of Tang, Anderson, and Wang obscure the complex filiations between Lu Xun’s literary and critical output in the late teens and early twenties and what would only gradually emerge in the 1930s and 1940s as the more elaborate theorization of a realist philosophical aesthetics? These crucial and important filiations have not been adequately explored, primarily because the final conquest of Chinese bureaucratic realism in the early 1980s was too often projected retroactively back upon the period of its dynamic formation. As I noted earlier, this book is premised upon the conviction that the showdown between the poststructuralist sign and New Period “official realism” is both necessary and inevitable. In 1920s China, however, the future course of Chinese realism was far from clear and was oriented toward what was then broadly accepted in progressive intellectual and artistic circles as a genuinely “emancipatory Marxian discourse,” even if what was “emancipatory” in that discourse would be bitterly contested on the Chinese literary Left.89 What gradually coalesced into a discourse of realism was not simply the result of the successful

89 Kirk Denton provides a comprehensive analysis of the cultural and literary politics surrounding the work of both Lu Ling 路翎 and Hu Feng 胡风. See Kirk Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998). See also Shu Yunzhong’s Buglers on the Home Front: The Wartime Practice of the Qiyue School (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). It is difficult to exaggerate Hu Feng’s importance in understanding the literary politics of realism in China. Theodore Huters deftly triangulates Hu Feng’s connection to Lu Xun in relation to Party literary theorists in his “Hu Feng and the Critical Legacy of Lu Xun,” in Lu Xun and His Legacy, ed. Leo Lee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 129–52. Liu Kang examines Hu Feng in relation to both Lukács and Bakhtin (Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism, 92–110).

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translation/introduction ( fanyi jieshao 翻译介绍) of a pre-existing Western doctrine of literary realism. Very much to the contrary, realism’s course through 20th-century Chinese history offers a compelling example of one of the most diverse, creative, and complex engagements with a global literary modernity.

CHAPTER TWO

LU XUN’S AH Q AS “GRUESOME HYBRID” A type is a lesson which is man, a myth with a human face so plastic that it looks at you, a parable which nudges you with the elbow; a symbol which cries out, ‘Beware!’, an idea which is nerve, muscle and flesh. — Victor Hugo1 The philosopher as such is a symptomatologist, a typologist and a genealogist. We can recognize the Nietzschean trinity of the ‘philosopher of the future’; the philosopher-physician (the physician interprets symptoms), the philosopher-artist (the artist moulds types), the philosopher-legislator (the legislator determines rank, genealogy).—Gilles Deleuze2

If in what follows I am guided by the conviction that in order for us to grasp what is so powerfully in play in the formation of Chinese realism we must begin with Lu Xun, I do so sharing with Tang Xiaobing, Marsten Anderson, and David Wang an acute sense of his importance. For each of those three, if in fundamentally different ways, the vast distance that separates Lu Xun’s fiction from what would become the generic expectations of much of official CCP theorists of realism is all too easy to show. This very gap between especially Lu Xun’s literary works and the theory of literary realism with which Chinese Marxists have long aligned him is, as I will show below, perhaps the most consummate sign of China’s literary modernity. For it indicates precisely the degree to which literature, now in its modern form, emerges fully in relation to theory and criticism. For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, German Romanticism inaugurates not only the modern concept of literature, but equally importantly and very much as a product of the same gesture, the institution of modern literary criticism. That what The Literary Absolute confirms regarding the modern institution of literary study above applies as much to Tang, Anderson, and Wang as it does the present work itself will be clear enough in what 1 Quoted in René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, 8 Vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–1993), 2: 257. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosphy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 75.

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follows. I want however to suggest here at the outset the fact that Lu Xun’s own work is inscribed fully within this problematic of modern literature-as-theory of literature, but in ways that have not yet been adequately examined and analyzed.3 In other words, as I will maintain consistently below, the distance that separates Lu Xun’s writing from the theory of realism that would later become the general theory of socialist literature in China is vast indeed. My purpose will be, however, to maintain first, that this difference is constitutive of modern literature, Chinese or otherwise, as such. Second, I want to locate Lu Xun, and especially his “True Story of Ah Q ,” within the much broader scope of what I will refer to as modern eidaesthetics. Lu Xun’s role in this process is unique, though for reasons that have less to do with his special genius than with the way he allowed a host of divergent, powerful, and at times contradictory discursive forces to play through his texts. The Lu Xun that emerges in this analysis will differ in decisive ways from especially those treatments of him that grant him the extravagant formative power as father of modern Chinese realist fiction. Rather, I treat Lu Xun’s work far more as a uniquely telling symptom of a far vaster process of the installation of an aesthetic ideology that had begun to take shape as early as Wang Guowei’s work on Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.4 For all his formidible critical powers, Lu Xun could never have fully anticipated, much less consciously organized and inaugurated the project of a modern philosophical aesthetics that grew up rapidly in the wake of his literary works. But his writing reveals the symptomatic signs of that process in ways that only Lu Xun could have managed to make apparent. Indeed, what is stunning about Lu Xun is the degree to which those forces are at work in his writing, despite the fact that their presence there is not the result of anything approximating a systematic theoretical commitment. Lu Xun does not install Chinese realism, nor, most of all, would it be justifiable to lay at his feet responsibility for all the consequences—both many and far-reaching—that followed in the wake of realism’s gradual institutionalization. But in his work it is 3 “[R]omanticism is neither mere ‘literature’ ([the Romantics] invent the concept) nor simply a ‘theory of literature’ (ancient and modern). Rather it is theory itself as literature or, in other words, literature producing itself as it produces its own theory” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 12). 4 Wang Guowei 王国维, “Shubenhua yu Nicai 叔本华与尼采,” Jiaoyu shijie 教育世界, 84/85, 1904. For a precise analysis of Wang Guowei’s engagement with aesthetics, see Wang Ban. The Sublime Figure of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 17–54.

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possible to discern the ultimate stakes of what realism was to become in China as a philosophical aesthetics. Lu Xun, Zarathustra, and the Type (dianxing) My initial purpose here will be to provide an account for the unique constellation of texts and concepts arrayed in Lu Xun’s work between 1920 and 1922. The first is Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the tensection prologue of which Lu Xun translated from German and published in June of 1920.5 The second element of this constellation is the term “type” (dianxing) which Lu Xun is the first in print to introduce into China in an essay entitled “After Translating ‘The Worker Shevyrev,’ ” (“Yile ‘Gongren Suihuilüefu’ zhi hou 译了‘工人 惠略夫 ’ 之后”) published in The Short Story Magazine in July of 1921.6 The third is Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q ,” which was published in the Morning Gazette (Chenbao fukan 晨报副刊) in more or less weekly installments between December 1921 and February 1922.7 As is well-known, the figure of Ah Q was considered to be China’s first literary type (dianxing).8 The relationship between these three elements—Zarathustra, the concept of the type, and Ah Q as type—adumbrates crucial features of Chinese realism, which I will discuss in greater detail in subsequent chapters. This particular constellation is meant initially to underscore the crucial proximity between the philosophical and the literary that attends the type’s emergence in China. There will be throughout the discourse of the type in Chinese realism from the early 1920s through to the 1980s an incessant oscillation between the registers of the philosophical

5 The translation, entitled “Chalatusitela de xuyan 察拉图斯忑拉的序言,” appeared in the monthly periodical New Tide (Xin Chao 新潮) 2, no. 5, under the pseudonym, Tang Si 唐俟. Not originally included in Lu Xun’s Collected Works, the translation was republished by the People’s Literature Publishing House in Beijing in 1959. Collected Translations of Lu Xun (Lu Xun yiwenji 鲁迅译文集), 10 volumes, (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1959). For a list of other and more complete translations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, see Cheung Chiu-yee’s Nietzsche in China (1904–1992): An Annotated Bibliography, Faculty of Asian Studies Monographs, New Series 19 (Canberra: The Australian National University, 1992). 6 Lu Xun translated Mikhail Artsybashev’s “The Worker Shevyrev” from German (LXQJ, 10: 170). The translation was published alongside the essay in The Short Story Magazine, 12, no. 7. 7 Lu Xun, “Ah Q Zhengzhuan,” LXQJ, 1: 487–527). 8 See Foster, Ah Q Archeology, 174–189.

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and the literary in nearly all critical discussions of the concept. Indeed, this oscillation can help us account for precisely why the political would begin to intercede in critical discussions of Chinese literature as early as the 1920s, but of course with increasing intensity from the 1930s on. It must be borne consistently in mind that I do not treat this oscillation or equivocation as a muddled blurring of conceptual registers or disciplinary distinctions. Rather, the fundamental instability that attends so many discussions of the type must be understood as constitutive of the very eidaesthetic nature of Chinese realism’s preoccupation with the figure (xingxiang). This issue is of particular relevance when it comes to Nietzsche. As Heidegger indicates in a series of lectures on Nietzsche in 1953, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is not, strictly speaking, or merely, a ‘literary’ character.”9 In other words, Zarathustra is, as Lacoue-Labarthe maintains in his discussion of Heidegger’s treatment of Nietzsche, not what Shao Lixin in his book Nietzsche in China terms a “fictional figure.”10 The consequence is that Zarathustra, essentially, is not poetry (it is neither Poesie nor Dichtung), even if it proceeds, as we will see, from what Heidegger calls the “poetifying” or “poetizing” “essence of reason,” das dichtende Wesen der Vernunft. Or if you prefer, Zarathustra is not a figura.11

For Lacoue-Labarthe, and as much for the Heidegger he analyzes, Zarathustra “still ‘figures’ something,” but that something is more than merely literary, since Zarathustra is the “Gestalt of the thinker who has thought metaphysics at the stage of its completion.”12 In other words, Zarathustra comes to inhabit that luminal space of figuration between philosophy and literature. My purpose here will not be to argue that the biographical person Lu Xun read Zarathustra in precisely the same way, since that is very unlikely. But having indicated the degree to which Zarathustra is located (by Lacoue-Labarthes’ careful reading of Heidegger’s Nietzsche) in the luminal space between literature and metaphysics, we should further note that Thus Spoke Zarathustra was

9 Martin Heidegger, “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” in Nietzsche, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 2: 211–232. 10 Lacoue-Labarthe distinguishes between figura and fictio in the Latin senses, which are more immediately restricted to the literary and Gestalt that encompasses the philosophical (Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 60–61). It is essential to keep in mind this modern notion of the “completion of metaphysics,” as it is one that, I will argue below, powerfully informs so much of Lu Xun’s thinking. 11 Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 60, italics in original. 12 Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 61.

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the Nietzschean text with which Lu Xun formed the most abiding of intellectual relationships.13 While Lu Xun never wrote in detail about what intrigued him in Zarathustra, Shao Lixin’s claim that “[f ]or Lu Xun Thus Spoke Zarathustra was first of all a literary work” is not only unduly constraining, but it also disregards the fact that the Nietzsche Lu Xun initially encountered in Japan was Nietzsche as philosopher and “cultural critic.”14 As the teacher of the Overhuman, Zarathustra could not have assumed the all too narrow significance for Lu Xun as simple fictional character.15 When, as Shao notes, Lu Xun finds in the Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev’s Shevyrev a “Nietzschean man of strength” (Nicai shi de qiangzhe 尼采式 的强者), Shao sees only a comparison between “Artsybashev’s fictional figure” and “Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s fictional figure.”16 Shao concludes flatly, “Lu Xun treated Nietzsche in a non-philosophical way.”17 And yet Lu Xun’s failure to treat Nietzsche with any “conceptual rigor,” whatsoever, means for Shao that Lu Xun could grasp Zarathustra solely in terms of literary criticism and literary technique. Such a conclusion is very clearly the product of what amounts to Shao’s own methodological premise that the division between philosophy and 13 Cheung Chiu-yee argues persuasively that the milieu of Nietzscheanism Lu Xun encountered in Japan reveals its influence in Lu Xun’s early cultural criticism, in particular in the essays “On the Extremities of Culture,” (Wenhua pianzhi lun 文化 偏至论) and “On the Power of Mara Poetry” (LXQJ, 1: 44–115). Both essays “echo the opinions of Takayama Chogyû’s “The Littérateur as Cultural Critic.” Summarizing briefly Takayama’s essay, Cheung writes that “a superman is a genius not a scholar or intellectual; ‘superman’ is in fact an artist or a creator” (Chiu-yee Cheung, “Tracing the ‘Gentle’ Nietzsche in Early Lu Xun,” in Autumn Flood: Essays in Honour of Mariaan Galik [Peter Lang, Bern 1998], 571–88). 14 Shao Lixin, Nietzsche in China (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), 60. Shao is no doubt correct that Lu Xun had never made a systematic study of Nietzsche’s works. Nor is it possible to dispute the fact that the project of literature was hugely important to Lu Xun. My point is not simply that Shao tends to discount all too readily the fact that not only did Lu Xun’s German reading ability gave him direct access to Nietzsche’s works. More importantly, Shao neglects the problem of the aesthetic dimensions of Nietzsche’s “philosophy,” dimensions that I argue were crucial to Lu Xun’s assimilation of him. 15 That Lu Xun made no effort to fashion himself a scholar of modern (Western) philosophy and hence wrote almost nothing on the subject, does not mean he failed fundamentally to grasp the essential parameters of continental European thought. Quite to the contrary, we have every reason to believe that his convictions regarding the “spiritual mission” of the role of the artist were derived not only from what might be termed a generalized Nietzscheanism prevalent in both China and Japan at the time, but from Kant as well, via the work of his friend and colleague Cai Yuanpei. 16 LXQJ, 1: 169. 17 Shao, Nietzsche, 60.

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literature is unproblematic and that Nietzsche the philosopher did also write a work called Thus Spoke Zarathustra that could be read in a purely literary fashion. We hardly need assume that Lu Xun read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the same rigorous manner as one of Aristotle’s treatises, as Heidegger counsels in What is Called Thinking, in order to sustain the conviction that Zarathustra represented far more of a complex “figure” for Lu Xun and that he had more than a mere intuition that Zarathustra’s author was also much closer to what Deleuze terms above a “philosopher-artist” as molder of types.18 What Shao neglects in tracking down Lu Xun’s references to Nietzsche, especially in the case of Artsybashev, is anything derived from Nietzsche other than what would serve Lu Xun the writer of modern fiction. It is certainly legitimate for Shao to assert that Nietzsche’s prose furnished Lu Xun with the odd turn of phrase, even where Nietzsche’s meaning is fundamentally transformed. But there is something quite fundamental to Nietzsche that touches directly upon how Lu Xun understood Artsybashev’s work, namely the concept of the type. For it is this essay which not only introduces the notion of the type for the first time into modern Chinese discourse. More importantly, this essay understands the “Nietzschean-style strongman,” as in fact a type (dianxing, Typus). Indeed, for Lu Xun, Artsybashev presents so Nietzschean a figure in the character Sanin in his novel of the same name, that Lu Xun asserts the connection alongside Arstybashev’s own protests that the philosopher Max Stirner played the larger role in forming Sanin’s extreme egoism—what Lu Xun identifies in the essay as “anarchistic individualism or individual anarchism.”19 On this count, Lu Xun’s assessment coincides with many critics, past and present, who find the presence of Nietzsche in the novel difficult to deny.20 In fact, the term

18 Lacoue-Labarthe also quotes Heidegger on the latter’s consistent resistance to reading Zarthustra in terms of a “poetics”: “The oft-given statement that Nietzsche’s thinking had fatally turned into poetry [ins Dichten], is itself only the abandonment of the questioning of thought.” This line comes from Heidegger’s The Question of Being, quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 60. 19 LXQJ, 10: 166. 20 “That Sanin is a descendant of Nietzsche’s Übermensch (the superman) was long assumed by the few critics who gave serious consideration to Sanin before the 1980s. Curiously, Artsybashev himself declared that he had never ‘properly’ read Nietzsche—a writer who was, he explained, ‘out of sympathy with me both in his ideas and the bombastic form of his works.’ Moreover, as if emphasizing his rejection of Nietzsche, Artsybashev has Sanin discard Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–92), spit in disgust, and fall asleep” (263). Nicholas Luker, author of the afterword to the English translation

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dianxing itself likely derives in the essay directly from Artsybashev’s own discussion of his character Sanin, in defensive response to critics who excoriated the novel as pornography. Artsybashev wrote that Sanin was an “apology for individualism; the hero of the novel is a type. In its pure form this type is still new and rare, but its spirit is in every frank, bold, and strong representative of the new Russian.”21 Luker’s brief discussion of Sanin highlights one element of the influence of Max Stirner (so similar to Nietzsche that the latter was accused by Eduard von Hartmann of having plagiarized Stirner’s work) that is central to the problem at hand, and one I will take up later in regard to the problem of the type in the 1940s, namely the process by which “Man,” as “species-being” comes to supplant God. [Stirner] believes that since modern individuals are preoccupied with the spiritual, they are ruled by abstract notions, such as morality and law, which derive chiefly from Christian ethics. But if individuals supplant Christianity with supreme love of their unique selves, then such notions become irrelevant. Denying any being higher than themselves, [Stirner’s] self-conscious egotists see themselves as the gods of all that lives in a world where “God has had to give place . . . to Man.”22

It is important here to register the proximity between the introduction of the type in Chinese criticism and the powerful impulse to give aesthetic expression to the figure of the human species-being in its final emergence with the completion of metaphysics. In other words, as we will see in much of what follows, what radicalizes the thinking of the type both in China and, as we shall see in chapter four, Germany as well, is that it is nearly always addressed in terms of the end of metaphysics it seeks to accomplish. Again, what is crucial to our purpose here is recognizing that even in those critical discussions that address themselves for the most part to literary problems of realism and typicality, the problem of philosophy resounds consistently throughout.

of Sanin, adds in a footnote, “The word ‘properly’ in Artsybashev’s remark may well be the most operative: it is well-nigh impossible to deny some influence, at least, of Nietzsche in Sanin” (363 n3). (Mikhail Artsybashev, Sanin: A Novel, trans. Michael R. Katz, intro. Otto Boele, afterword Nicholas Luker [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001]). The Nietzsche/Stirner relationship is itself complex. See Deleuze’s discussion of Stirner in Nietzsche and Philosophy. 21 Michael Petrovitch Artzibashef, The Millionaire, trans. Percy Pinkerton (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1915, reprinted 1965), 9. 22 Luker, “Afterword,” 263, emphasis added.

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As should gradually become clearer, the discursive milieu of philosophy that in increasingly vital ways plays host to the modern Chinese literary criticism is very much the product of an especially 19th-century Russian literary critical idiom that had since Vassarion Belinsky (1811–1848) conceived of the essence of literature as intelligible almost solely in light of the philosophical bequest of German Romantic thought. Lu Xun’s essay on Artsybashev can be understood as inaugurating not only the discourse of the type in China, but also the initial alignment of Chinese criticism with Russian (then Soviet) thought. The countless references to what is collectively termed Chinese “Marxist” or “leftist” literary thought aside in Western discussions of Chinese realism all too easily obscure the fundamental fact that it was the critical work of such figures as Belinksky, Chernyshevsky, and Dubrolyubov who provided Chinese critics with a corpus of eidaesthetic literary criticism so extensive that it would help sustain a critical interest in the problem of the image (xingxiang) in China well into the 1980s. Precisely for this reason, there is a certain inevitability to the fact that later in the 1920s, Lu Xun would choose to introduce the criticism of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Soviet Union’s first Commissar of Education, to Chinese readers with his translation of “On Art” (Yishulun 艺术论) in June of 1929 and then Lunacharsky’s “Literature, Art, and Criticism” (Wenyi yu piping 文艺与批评) in December, each from Japanese translations. Lunacharsky has been described by Paul Pickowicz in his study of Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 as offering a “middle road” between Plekhanov’s materialist determinism and what Pickowicz terms idealism of the “Russian populists” (Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Herzen, in particular).23 What I would like to emphasize here is that the materialism/idealism dyad that so heavily informs this reading of Lunacharsky remains necessarily silent on the essential degree to which Lunacharsky’s thinking on aesthetics was powerfully shaped by his embrace of Nietzsche. Indeed, Pickowicz neglects to mention that what Lu Xun translated was some of Lunarcharsky’s earliest theoretical work on art, “Fundamentals of Positivist Aesthetics” (1904), a work written during a period when it is generally accepted that Lunacharsky

23 Paul Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Qu Qiubai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 144. Pickowicz developed this interpretation at greater length in his earlier Marxist Literary Thought and China: A Conceptual Framework (Center of Chinese Studies, Institute for East Asian Studies, Berkeley: University of California, 1980), 47–54.

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was very much a “Nietzschean Marxist.”24 On the one hand, the term “positivist” in the title indicates that the treatise was very much directed against what he deemed not only the “neo-Kantian ‘idealism’ of the ‘Legal Marxists,’ ” a turn of the century group who were able to publish their discussions of Marxism.25 Nonetheless, “positivist” was a somewhat peculiar choice, since as A. L. Tait notes in his monograph on Lunacharsky, “Lunacharsky’s ‘positivist aesthetics’ ” needs to be understood as a denunciation of “any attempt to explain the ultimate problems of human existence in scientific terms.”26 It is difficult to imagine that Lu Xun was not deeply impressed by Lunacharsky’s explicit invocation of Nietzsche’s Overhuman in the context of revolution and artistic production, the purpose of which is to instill in the people “[the] feeling of tragedy, the joy of struggle and victory, with Promethean aspirations, stubborn pride, implacable courage, to unite hearts in a common rush of feeling for the Superman.”27 I note these features of Lunacharsky’s early work on aesthetics in order to underscore the fact that his criticism of neo-Kantian idealist ethics was informed far less by Marx than by Nietzsche. Indeed, it is also helpful to point out that Plekhanov’s deterministic historical materialism provoked Lunacharsky’s two-volume study Religion and Socialism (1909–1911), in which he detailed his conception of “God-building,” offering socialism the kind of religious “enthusiasm” the mechanistic readings of Marxism failed to provide. Chernyshevsky plays a very

A. L. Tait writes that “Raimund Sesterhenn supports George Kline’s terminology, noting that, at least until about 1915, the designation of Lunacharsky as a ‘Nietzschean Marxist‘ is entirely apposite” (A. L. Tait, “Lunacharsky: a Nietzschean Marxist,” in Nietzsche in Russia, ed. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986], 276. Tait goes on to quote Kline in a footnote: “When, in the early 1900’s, some of the early Russian Marxists (especially Lunacharksy and Vol’sky) became dissatisfied with the impersonalism and the anti-individualism of Marxian historical materialism (a lineal descendant, in this respect, of Hegelianism), they turned explicitly to Nieztsche for support in their ‘deviation’ ” (Tait, “Lunacharsky,” 276n4). 25 Neil Harding, ‘Legal Marxism,’ in The Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (London: Blackwell, 1983, 2nd rev. edn., 1991), 307–308. According to Harding, “Legal Marxists” such as Peter Struve “stressed, in particular, the progressive role of capitalism and its modernizing, Westernizing, civilizing, significance for contemporary Russia.” They eventually looked to neo-Kantian ethics as a basis for Russian socialism (Harding, “Legal Marxists,” 276). 26 A. L. Tait, Lunacharsky: Poet of the Revolution (1875–1907), Birmingham Slavonic Monographs 15 (Birmingham: University of Birmingham, Department of Russian Language and Literature, 1984), 54. 27 Quoted in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2002), 76. 24

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important role in what would emerge in Chinese realist theory, but what Lunacharsky presents to Lu Xun (as opposed to Pickowicz’s Qu Qiubai) is a thinking of a revolutionary aesthetics marked clearly with what were surely for Lu Xun quite readily recognizable Nietzschean features. Indeed, Lu Xun very explicitly acknowledges the degree to which a preoccupation with religion saturates Lunachrasky’s pre-1917 writings. In his “Afterword” to Rou Shi’s translation of Lunacharsky’s play Faust and the City, Lu Xun indicates not only the decisive role the Swiss philosopher Richard Heinrich Ludwig Avenarius played in the formation of Lunacharsky’s Fundamantals of Positivist Aesthetics, he also notes that “[Although] Lunacharsky always located himself in the contemporary Russian anti-religious movement, he was always extremely interested in religion.”28 In light of all this, it should be easier to see that the aesthetic/literary and the (post-)metaphysical share a much closer proximity in Lu Xun than has generally been acknowledged. In Shao Lixin’s effort to distinguish between what he reads as Lu Xun’s sketchy conceptual grasp of the philosopher Nietzsche’s and Zarathustra’s strictly literary impact upon Lu Xun, the “writer,” Shao ends up obscuring the Nietzsche/Marx relation in Lu Xun’s work. Shao writes, for example, that: If Lu Xun conceived of the idea of ethical evolution when reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, his social outlook was very different from that of Nietzsche. Lu Xun was a socialist by nature. His “true human beings” [zhenren 真人] could well have been a footnote to young Karl Marx’s “species-beings.”29

Shao’s insight here is considerable, since he quite correctly sees in Lu Xun’s notion of zhenren precisely what Chinese criticism would much later encounter in Marx as human “species-being” (Gattungswesen des Menschen).30 But while Shao appears well-aware that this vital element of the early Marx was almost certainly unknown to Lu Xun in precisely this form,31 he still insists that it represents something proto-socialist in LXQJ, 7: 353. Shao, Nietzsche, 58. 30 For a critically informed and nuanced discussion of the complex character of Lu Xun’s humanism, as well as, the role of Nietzsche in his early writings, see Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 73–84. 31 While Marx did use the term “species-being” in some of his published work, the term is developed most extensively in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844, which were not made fully public until 1932. As Robert C. Tucker notes, portions had 28 29

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Lu Xun, rather than a “philosophical concept” derived from a (philosophical) reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. To label Lu Xun in 1918 instead a proto-Nietzschean-Marxist, might be much closer to the truth, but such labels too easily occlude what are essentially very powerful tensions in Lu Xun—tensions that he clearly felt no compunction to either reconcile or systematize in any fashion. By 1918, when he wrote “Diary of a Madman,” Lu Xun was already a polyglot intellectual with broad access via German and Japanese to both literary and philosophical currents in Europe, Russia, and Japan, so it is hardly surprising to find such fusions already at play in his writing. In any case, the zhenren, like Zarathustra, the Overhuman (whose doctrine Zarathustra teaches), and, as I will argue below, Ah Q are fundamentally types, in the eideasthetic sense noted above, bringing into a decisively modern relation the philosophical and the aesthetic/ literary. Again, as figures, they are not strictly, purely, nor merely, literary characters.32 What is curious in Shao is that in this instance he is willing, (very perceptively) to register the most philosophical of Marx’s concepts in relation to Lu Xun’s literary work, while arguing systematically throughout his chapter on Lu Xun that nothing of Nietzschean philosophy pertains to Lu Xun—again, the “writer.” In part, one could perhaps say that this is symptomatic of much of the writing on the subject of Lu Xun’s Nietzsche and the degree to which across the political spectrum the Nietzsche in Lu Xun is held at a remove from his revolutionary sympathies. But it is also the consequence of reading Nietzsche in a certain way, or better put, reading Nietzsche neither in light of the problem of the type, nor in terms of the great extent to which the very possibility of distinguishing the philosophical from the literary is most profoundly at stake in Nietzsche. But what this should also make clear is that standard appellations materialist and idealist have been remarkably inadequate in terms of

been translated into Russian and published in the Soviet Union in 1927 (The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker [New York, London: Norton and Company, 1978], 66). Liu Kang notes that the earliest Chinese translation of a portion of the Manuscripts appeared in 1940. Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism, 134. 32 Lacoue-Labarthe writes that Zarathustra is a “figure in the strongest sense,” meaning that he is “the form, figure, imprint, [and] type of a humanity.” Lacoue-Labarthe notes others of these types, “Jünger’s Worker, Rilke’s Angel,” and asks, importantly for the current discussion, if we might also include “Freud’s Oedipus and Marx’s Proletarian” (Lacoue-Labarthe, Typograghy, 52). I will address this question in the next chapter.

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helping us grasp fundamental dimensions of what constituted the formation of modern Chinese literature and the trajectory of realism it would take. Even less helpful, though, of course, intimately related to the materialist/idealist divide, are the labels “left” and “right.” That such terms were very often invoked primarily in order to indict and hence foreclose both discussion and thought is a basic fact of 20thcentury discourse. And yet the hazing usages of “left” and “right” are by no means exclusive to the Chinese mainland political scene, nor are the problems that result. David Wang’s assertion that “[b]y the end of 1928, Lu Xun had turned his attention to such ‘orthodox’ Marxist theoreticians as Plekhanov and Lunacharsky, and was ready to embark on his pilgrimage to the far left,” is profoundly misleading, both in terms of what he deems “orthodox” and “far left” as well as the conclusions we would seem compelled to draw regarding the thinking and politics of the two Russians and their Chinese appropriator.33 First, the “ideological” antipathy between Plekhanov and Lunacharsky was sufficiently bitter, for reasons partially alluded to above, so as to require a good deal more nuance when it comes to pegging the two thinkers’ views “orthodox” and especially “far left,” respectively.34 Even allowing for the fact that Lunacharsky after 1917 distanced himself from his earlier “god-building” aesthetics, it was precisely (if not exclusively) the earlier works Lu Xun felt compelled to translate into Chinese. It should be added that the play by Lunacharsky, Faust and the City, which Lu Xun called upon his student Rou Shi to translate, was written initially in 1908, when, as the forgoing has made clear, Lunacharsky was still very much of a “Nietzschean-Marxist” “god-builder.” Furthermore, Lunacharsky’s “ideological” distance from Plekhanov was also a direct consequence of the former’s efforts to re-privilege (“rehabilitate”?) 19th-century Russian democratic criticism against Plekhanov’s “materialist” critique of them as suffering from what Victor Terras termed, “ahistorical idealist Wang, History, 86. A small measure of the complex political landscape and the need to resist pigeonholing of intellectual figures into “orthodox,” “liberal,” camps is indicated by Wang’s “liberal” Voronsky’s explicit alignment of himself with the “orthodox Marxist” Plekhanov: “Plekhanov’s struggle for materialism was a struggle against demoralizing bourgeois ideology, a struggle against the dominant tendency among scholars. Plekhanov was merciless and entered into this battle fully armed with the knowledge of the history of philosophy. With what annihilating criticism Plekhanov spoke out against our empirio-monists, Bogdanov, Bazarov and Lunacharsky!” (Aleksandr Konstantinovich Voronsky, “G.V. Plekhanov,” http://www.sovlit.org/akv/Texts/Plekhanov1_1920.pdf, accessed December 15, 2006.) 33 34

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fantasies.”35 David Wang can most certainly be forgiven for not being aware of just how complex the Russian element of this problem is: apart from Paul Pickowicz the only other study to address the subject at length is Mau-sang Ng’s The Russian Hero in Modern Chinese Fiction, a work that focuses almost exclusively upon literature. My concern is rather that too many things are lost in the kind of radical foreshortening Wang’s political labeling provokes. It renders us fundamentally unable to grasp what even Pickowicz in his excellent study of Qu Qiubai never fully registers, namely that the heyday of 19th century Russian criticism in China took place after Liberation.36 Moreover, where are we to locate Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four who collectively heaped scorn on the very Russian “democratic” revolutionary tradition of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dubrolyubov, etc. that Lunacharsky endorsed and that Chinese criticism would as well?37 In precisely the same way Wang’s reading of Diary of a Madman poses Lu Xun as (in-)advertent instigator of (leftist) political violence and Red Guard patri(matri)cidal mayhem, he ends up aligning Lu Xun inexplicably with the “far-left” likes of

Victor Terras, Belinskij and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974), 262. Terras’s work, despite its limitations (published in 1974, it is wholly oblivious to anything that comprises “poststructuralism”) is the probably one of the most comprehensive treatments of Russian aesthetic theory available in English. It addresses directly and in rich detail all of the figures in Russian criticism that decisively shaped the formation of realist criticism in China. Terras’s work is helpful because it avoids political pigeon-holing and emphasizes throughout the degree to which Russian and then Soviet criticism emerges out of German Romantic thought. Though it follows a fundamentally different track than that of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Terras’s book nonetheless provides a clear sense of the enormous degree to which Russian criticism conceived itself in relation to metaphysics. It is important to foreground this element of the problem of realism in China. 36 Pickowicz limits his focus entirely to the 1923–1935 period, and in doing so assumes a degree of clarity to the “conceptual framework” of Marxist literary theory in China at the time which I am not persuaded existed. Indeed, precisely because it did not, it was only later, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, that so many of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky’s works were published both in Russian and in Chinese translation and in multiple editions. Pickowicz deserves credit for sensing quite some time ago that a familiarity with Russian and Soviet literary criticism was essential to understanding Chinese literary thought from the 1920s on. And he is certainly correct when he writes, “To continue to view leftist writers in China as having understood and interpreted Marxist literary theory in a uniform way is to run the risk of badly misunderstanding the intellectual origins of the debates that have racked the Chinese literary world from the early twenties to the present day [1980]” (Pickowicz, Conceptual Framework, 3). 37 On this count, see Merle Goldman, “The Political Uses of Lu Xun in the Cultural Revolution and After,” in Lu Xun and his Legacy, ed. Leo Oufan Lee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 180–196, 187. 35

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Wang Hongwen—accomplishing precisely what the Gang of Four wished for in their appropriation of Lu Xun. The point is not simply that Wang’s political measuring stick is in dire need of a more precise set of calibrations. The larger point is simply that when it comes to the formation of the institution of modern Chinese literature and especially the theory of realism against and through which it develops, a glib and unreflective deployment of the terms “right” and “left” easily obscures far more than it clarifies. Which is surely not to say that the terms are meaningless: rather, it is to say that they are meaningful only to the extent we are willing to acknowledge the extraordinarily diverse range of discursive determinants at play (and in a thoroughly overdetermined manner) in the work of a figure like Lu Xun. I will take this issue up on more detail later, when I examine some of the discursive filiations outlined above that are situated in parallel though nonetheless utterly distinct ways in Heidegger and Cai Yi. There it should be clear that despite the necessary extent to which right and left would apply in the cases of these two thinkers respectively, something more fundamental to the preoccupations of each in the type can only be understood if we suspend our compulsion to map 20th-century political/philosophical/literary history solely in those terms. Ah Q , Ressentiment and Typology I have noted that Lu Xun utilizes the term type for the first time in modern Chinese criticism. What then of Ah Q as type, the third element I drew into constellation above? The presumably Nietzschean features of this novella have been remarked upon often, and I will address this issue first. Kirk Denton finds in Ah Q a prime example of Nietzschean ressentiment, likening Ah Q’s desire for revenge to Nietzsche’s utterly creepy early Church Father Tertullian, who in his De Spectaculis, swoons at the prospect of watching those who in their lifetimes defiled Christ roasted alive in the flames of hell.38 While such a reading is certainly correct to some degree, it risks overestimating the degree to which Ah Q ever manifests something approximating actual ressentiment. Chiu-Yee Cheung in his important study Lu Xun: The Chinese “Gentle” Nietzsche

38 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 31.

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writes, “Ah-Qism is . . . Ah Q’s only means to cope with his miserable life; and more importantly, it is full of ressentiment. Ah Q’s ressentiment is revealed when he fantasized about his vengeful looting and killing after joining the rebels.”39 As I will argue below, Ah Q is in fact displays remarkably little ressentiment. Further, I will show that since the problem of revenge is more complex in Nietzsche, the diagnosis of ressentiment in Ah Q , obscures our understanding of what Ah Q expresses as a type. Though a year and half separates the composition of Lu Xun’s baihua translation of Zarathustra from his “True Story of Ah Q ,” the essay he wrote on Artsybashev indicates that as late as July 1921, the figure of the Übermensch continued to inform his critical writing. It goes without saying that Ah Q would be far closer to what Nietzsche terms in Ecce Homo the “gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power,” to paraphrase, than any Overhuman.40 In applying this description to Ah Q , my purpose is not to argue that he is either a prophet or a fanatic, much less a “founder of religions.” Ah Q as “gruesome hybrid” would mean only that he embodies a typological admixture of the manifestly pathological—(and it is here Ah Q—or more precisely, Ah Qism, enters the discourse of National Character) as well as an incipient force of insurrection against a late imperial social and political order, investing him with a dimension of the will to power. Of the many things Ah Q is thoroughly incapable of experiencing, “bad conscience” ranks perhaps higher than his utter lack of compassion. Ah Q’s mind is host to many kinds of thoughts, but there is Cheung, Lu Xun, 59. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How to Become What One Is, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 5. Ecce Homo was first published in 1908, so Lu Xun would certainly have had access to it, though that is not my point here. Nietzsche uses this phrase as a means to distinguish his Zarathustra from earlier “prophets,” “fanatics,” etc. Ah Q is, of course, equally distant from the “Overhuman.” To quote Nietzsche more fully: “Here [in Zarathustra] no ‘prophet‘ is speaking, none of those gruesome hybrids [schauerliche Zwitter] of sickness and will to power whom people call founders of religions . . . [Zarathustra says] precisely the opposite of everything that any ‘sage,’ ‘saint,’ ‘world-redeemer,’ or any other décadent would say in such a case“ (5). Ah Q , both the specific character in Lu Xun’s novella, and especially the much broader determination of “Ah Q” as “Ah Qism,” (something which I argue below is even more a function of the narrator than Ah Q himself ) clearly combines the pathological with an incipient, if vague and misdirected, insurrectionary force. Ah Q , of course, is granted no such status by either the narrator nor by anyone in Wei Village. It is precisely to the degree that Ah Q stands so utterly isolated against the backdrop of Wei Village that he was able to figure something so forcefully and distinctly for his readers, something later Marxist critics would attempt to positively appropriate. 39 40

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nothing of Nietzsche’s “dark workshop” in Ah Q.41 At best, Ah Q can indeed inflict a measure of physical pain upon himself, slapping himself twice in the face after having all his money stolen in the gambling table melee. He experiences humiliation, but only momentarily. But then, in the twinkling of an eye, he transformed that defeat into victory! He raised his right hand, one after the other, gave himself two sharp slaps across the mouth. His face burned with a prickly pain. After those slaps, however, he began to feel at peace with himself. It was as though Ah Q had done the slapping and the person he had slapped was some other Ah Q [bie yige zij 别一个自己—lit., another self ]. And before too long it actually seemed as though he had slapped someone else altogether—though he had to admit that his own face still stung a bit. Complacent and content, Ah Q now lay down—victorious. He slept.42

In this passage, Ah Q’s actions serve as a vivid parody of the (aborted) formation of subjective interiority, within which, if properly formed, one would find the “false, shimmering light” that illuminates the “dark workshop” whose purpose is to “fabricate . . . ideal[s].” But with Ah Q , no such interiority exists. His capacity to “reflect” upon himself never results in anything other than the complacent assertion of “victory.” Indeed, if we read further along in the same passage of the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche’s faux-Socratic dialogue with the good Mr. Nosey Daredevil (Herr Vorwitz und Wagehals, lit. Mr. Meddlesome and Daredevil), we bear witness with Nietzsche’s nosy interlocutor to the very process of “bad conscience’s” manufacture—a process in which Ah Q himself is constitutionally (and ever blissfully, piaopiaoran 飘飘然) incapable of partaking. I will quote this passage from On the Genealogy of Morality, which, I should add, immediately precedes section 15 in which Nietzsche’s Tertullian appears, since it bears significantly on

Deleuze writes, “These two aspects of Christianity form what Nietzsche calls ‘bad conscience’ or the internalization of pain. They define truly Christian nihilism, that is to say the way in which Christianity denies life; on the one side the machine for manufacturing guilt, the horrible pain-punishment equation, on the other side the machine to multiply pain, the justification by pain, the dark workshop” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 15). Deleuze alludes to a passage in the Genealogy of Morals: “Would anyone like to have a little look down in to the secret of how ideals are fabricated on this earth? Who has enough pluck? . . . Come on! Here we have a clear glimpse into this dark workshop” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, 27). 42 I have used Lyell’s translation “Ah Q—The Real Story,” in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 101–172, 114. 41

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what I regard as the undecidable nature of both Ah Q the figure, and “Ah Q” the tale. —I cannot see anything but I can hear all the better. There is a guarded, malicious little rumour-mongering and whispering from every nook and cranny. I think people are telling lies; a sugary mildness clings to every sound. Lies are turning weakness into an accomplishment, no doubt about it—it’s just as you said.— —Go on! —and impotence which doesn’t retaliate is being turned into ‘goodness’; timid baseness is being turned into ‘humility’; submission to people one hates is being turned into ‘obedience’ (actually towards someone who, they say, orders this submission—they call him God). The inoffensiveness of the weakling, the very cowardice with which he is richly endowed, his standing-by-the-door, his inevitable position of having to wait, are all given good names as ‘patience’, also known as the virtue; not-beingable-to-take-revenge is called not-wanting-to-take-revenge, it might even be forgiveness (‘for they know not what they do-but we know what they are doing!’). They are also talking about ‘loving your enemies’—and sweating while they do it. —Go on! —... —No! Wait a moment! You haven’t said anything yet about the masterpieces of those black magicians who can turn anything black into whiteness, milk and innocence:—haven’t you noticed their perfect raffinement, their boldest, subtlest, most ingenious and mendacious stunt? Pay attention! These cellar rats full of revenge and hatred—what do they turn revenge and hatred into? Have you ever heard these words? Would you suspect, if you just went by what they said, that the men around you were nothing but men of ressentiment? . . .43

This lengthy passage helps illuminate two vital features of “The True Story of Ah Q”, which have not been adequately addressed. It is necessary to keep in mind that if we are to think of Ah Q as a type we have good reason to do so in light of not only Lu Xun’s encounter with Zarathustra, a text with which he had an already two-decade long engagement, but what one can only speculate were countless other texts of Nietzsche’, including very likely the On Genealogy of Morals itself.44 As should be apparent to readers familiar with Lu Xun’s novella, Ah Q fails in nearly every respect to practice the labor of ideals Mr. Presumptuous Nietzsche, Genealogy, 28. See Chiu-yee Cheung’s Nietzsche in China: An Annotated Bibliography, 1904–1992, Faculty of Asian Studies Monographs New Series, No. 19 (The Australian National University, Canberra, 1992). 43

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surveys in the dark factory of “bad conscience.” The fundamental structure of Chinese society on the eve of the 1911 revolution, as conceived by Lu Xun the polemical iconoclast, is that of a neo-Confucian social order that demands the formation of ideals out of what is for him a system of oppression and hypocrisy. Thus, in Nietzsche’s case “goodness,” “humility,” “obedience,” “patience” are virtues hammered out in the workshop precisely in order to mask “powerlessness,” “submission,” “cowardice,” and “incapacity for revenge.” What is essential to recognize about Ah Q is that he is almost entirely absent from the factory floor where such ideals are manufactured. Indeed, the contempt with which he views one and all is as total as it is inexplicable. Since he thought so well of himself, Ah Q considered the other villagers simply beneath his notice. He went so far with this that he even looked down his nose at the village’s two Young Literati. He didn’t realize, of course, the up there in the rarified world of scholar-officialdom those whom one doth Young Literati name can darn well get to be those whom one must Budding Talents proclaim—if you don’t keep an eye on them. That’s why Old Master Qian and Old Master Zhao were so all-fired respected in the village: they were daddies to those two Young Literati—and rich to boot. Ah Q , however was less than impressed. “My son’s gonna be a lot richer.”45

Why the civil service examination degree as the universally acknowledged and preeminent form of social prestige in China means nothing to Ah Q is never explained by the narrator. By what possible rights might Ah Q the lumpen-peasant in very late-imperial China hold such a view, and from what source does so remarkable an evaluation derive? As the examinations are abolished later in the story, it is almost as if Ah Q had successfully effected a transvaluation of the supreme value in Chinese civilization. In any case, it certainly places him at a very clear and decisive remove from those of his conservative contemporaries, like his biographer, who look upon “Chinese spiritual civilization” as the world’s crowning glory. Ah Q certainly does not. If Ah Q holds his fellow Wei Villagers in contempt, the citizens in the larger town nearby to which Ah Q occasionally absconds fare no better, for they are deemed just as miserable as his village neighbors. The one area in which Ah Q seems to lay claim to some measure of Confucian morality lies in sexual mores, as the chapter “Tragedy

45

Lu Xun, “Ah Q ,” Lyell trans., 108.

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of Love” suggests so abundantly. We are told by the narrator based upon his observations, that when it came to “the separation of the sexes” (nannü zhi dafang 男女之大防), Ah Q “was well endowed with a moral integrity that made him despise heretical behavior” (henyou paichi yiduan [. . .] de zhengqi 很有排斥异端[. . .]的正气).46 He is also observed by the narrator to have regularly deployed his customary “indignant glare” (numu er shi 怒目而视) at any man and woman he caught speaking to one another, since “they were surely illicitly engaged” and that he felt well within moral rights to hurl the odd castigatory stone at their backs. It is made perfectly clear, of course, that this apparent moral indignation is the direct consequence of the very sexual frustration that will later erupt in the Zhao family kitchen once he is alone with Amah Wu, foreshadowing one of the entire novella’s most equivocal moments in the final scene.47 It would fit very much with the information provided in the expository sequence the narrator provides to conclude that we would find Ah Q busily slaving away in the “dark workshop” of neo-Confucian sexual mores, were it not for the fact that we can at best find only his spectral presence there, since the only evidence that his “thinking was thoroughly in accord with the sagacious wisdom of our classical [Confucian] tradition,” (shengjing xianchuan 圣经贤传) is provided by a highly suspect narrator whose own social and ideological distance from Ah Q is apparent from the first page of the story.48 Indeed, save for the “preface,” nowhere else in the entire novella does the narrator wax so extensively and without reserve on what constitutes the received tradition of neo-Confucian sexual ethics, doing so in the most extreme and jarring heteroglossia of vernacular and classical Chinese.49 His classical litany of the evils of Chinese womankind completely overwhelms the object of his narration,

Lu Xun, “Ah Q ,” Lyell trans., 125. LXQJ, 1: 499. I will return to this point shortly. For the time being it must suffice to recall all assertions regarding Ah Q’s chaste upholding of neo-Confucian sexual strictures aside, it is clear Ah Q is willing to take whatever liberties with women he can. Ah Q will pinch women’s thighs in crowds and we know that it is his sexual reconnoitering that arouses his interest in women in public in the first place. “He would often take special notice of a woman he deemed ‘surely out to seduce willing male partners ( ye nanren 野男人),’ but she would never so much as smile at him” (LXQJ, 1: 500). The entire lengthy expository aside provided by the narrator is motivated, it should be recalled, by Ah Q’s earlier bullying encounter with the “young nun,” which leaves him sexually aroused, unable to sleep. 48 Lu Xun, “Ah Q”, Lyell trans., 124. 49 Liu, Translingual, 71. 46 47

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Ah Q , with the result that a radical dissonance emerges between the narration of actual events and the narrator’s exposition. On the level of events, we simply have (at the end of chapter three) Ah Q sexually harassing the young nun (“If that monk can grope (dongde 动得) you, why can’t I?”) pinching her cheek, (beginning of chapter four), pondering the need for offspring in a state of sexual arousal as he rubs his fingers still slick from the moisture of her face, and as he recalls her curse that he die without posterity. Lu Xun makes it abundantly apparent that the narrator’s pious speculations on Chinese civilizational sexual propriety are his own and can only be forced upon Ah Q. Lyell’s translation marvelously captures this heterglossia. May you never have a son, Ah Q! The nun’s curse echoed in his ears again and set Ah Q to thinking, That’s right, oughta have a woman! If I die with no son, who’s gonna sacrifice a bowl of rice now and then for my ghost to eat? Yeah, gotta have a woman! Now bear in mind gentle reader, Of the three things which do unfilial be / The worst is to lack posteritie. And then too, if you also remember how the classics tell of the exemplary concern of Ziwen, in those days of yore, lest the ghosts of Ruo’ao clan go hungry woman and man—a great human tragedy, indeed!—then you’ll see right off quick that Ah Q’s thinking was, as a matter of fact, thoroughly in accord with the sagacious morality of our classical tradition. Unfortunately, however, after his thoughts started galloping off in this direction, Ah Q completely lacked the art to rein in his unbridled heart.50

Which establishes but two things: First, Ah Q is entirely (and merely) beholden to a “superstitious belief ” in the fate of his soul, as would fully be expected of him as a lumpen-peasant on the eve of the 1911 revolution. Second, Ah Q’s actual behavior toward women—the young nun, the anonymous woman whose thigh he pinches in the crowd, his sexual advances toward Amah Wu—all manifestly contradict the narrator’s pious invocations of classical Confucian gender dogma, rendered in a stilted classical prose style that could not be more alien to Ah Q’s own rustic idiom. Ah Q is as resistant to his biographer’s strained attempt to render him a properly interpolated subject of neo-Confucian sexual propriety, as his life/being/character are to inscription within any prior traditional Chinese literary genre. Indeed, it is rarely if ever remarked in Ah Q criticism that he is just as far removed from any faith in the

50

Lu Xun, “Ah Q ,” Lyell trans., 124.

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innate superiority of Chinese civilization. Once we have gradually peeled away the various layers of ideological lacquering the narrator attempts to encase Ah Q within, what is left is far more the “gruesome hybrid” I alluded to above and to which I will return below. The Biographer’s (and Our) Ah Q and Arthur Smith’s Character/Soul/Bild-less Chinese Of course, for our purposes what matters most is Deleuze’s two “machines”: the one for fabricating guilt and the other for “multiplying pain.” Ah Q never displays the slightest inclination to set these two dreadful devices to work upon or within himself. The wiry and pugnacious Ah Q suffers multiple privations and injuries—hunger, cold, beatings—and experiences humiliation, terror, and finally his own annihilation; but never for a moment does guilt ever becloud what exists of his inner landscape. Nothing of the interiority (as soul ) carved out as if with a scalpel by the labor of “bad conscience” is ever allowed to befall Ah Q.51 Try as he might through bringing to bear the most distant of classical allusions from the Zuo Zhuan 左传 and to the Lienü Zhuan 烈女传, Ah Q’s biographer is simply unable to compel his subject to suffer even the most meager pang of neo-Confucian conscience at his multiple violations of the “separation of man and woman”—none of which, it should be added, comes even remotely close to realizing a sexual liaison, though that is clearly his wish. Very much to the contrary, Ah Q in this chapter is described seven times “as if floating on air” ( piaopiaoran), amounting to surely a mock version of Nietzsche’s “sovereign” individual, “the free, the light, the irresponsible.”52 To an astonishing degree, Ah Q not only in this chapter, but in nearly every instance he is met with resistance, defeat, humiliation or insult, responds with affirmation, even if consistently in the most

51 Commenting on a passage in the Genealogy of Morals, Deleuze writes, “Interiority is a complex notion. What is interiorized is primarily active force; but interiorized force becomes manufacturer of pain; and as pain is produced more abundantly, interiority gains ‘in depth, width and height,’ an ever more voracious abyss. This means, secondly, that pain in its turn is interiorized, sensualised, spiritualised” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 129). 52 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 137.

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ludicrous manner.53 In this, Ah Q far more approximates what is at work in the “affirmation of the will to power,” the “conversion of heavy into light, of low into high, of pain into joy.”54 It goes obviously without saying that Ah Q is at a very distant remove from the Overhuman, not least of all because of the mordant humor with which he is crafted in the novella. Lu Xun understood his Nietzsche well enough to find the figure of the Overhuman indistinct and distant (miaomang 渺茫) at best.55 Julian Roberts writes, As Nietzsche describes it, the crucial feature of futurity is its distance: it is an absence which orders . . . In one example, the future “superman” is the distant figure which orders the attitudes of the present: [Nietzsche writes] “The future and the most distant should be the cause of your today; in your friend you should love the superman as your cause.”56

So it is clearly not the case that Lu Xun sought to limn the features of the Overhuman in Ah Q. But what this should suggest is that reading Ah Q narrowly as an essential embodiment of ressentiment fails to register other very vital elements of the novella. Ah Q criticism, in its focus on the problem of “national character” (guominxing), all too often circumvents the fundamental and deeply problematic juxtaposition of Ah Q and the world he inhabits. If we proceed from the essential premise that Wei Village for Lu Xun is yet another example of a rural Chinese village still sunk in the kind of hypocritical and dehumanizing late imperial social order sketched so vividly in the much darker “New Year’s Sacrifice,” then we need to account for Ah Q’s radically liminal status vis-à-vis Wei Village. Again, he holds practically everything and everyone in a towering contempt. He is not a composite intensification of all the late imperial ideological ailments that plagued rural Chinese

53 After calling himself an insect in an effort to persuade one particular “idler” to stop beating him, Ah Q seeks his signature “method of spiritual victory” ( jingshen shang de shenglifa 精神上的胜利法). “But not ten seconds later, Ah Q marched off satisfied with his triumph, feeling that he was the number one self-belittler, and if one removed self-belittler from that title, one was left with number one. Is the one who places first in the official examinations (zhuangyuan 状元) not also a number one?” (LXQJ, 1: 492). 54 Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 176. 55 In January of 1919 Lu Xun writes, “Though I find the Nietzschean Overhuman too indistinct, based on the facts of the currently existing kind of human in the world, one can be certain that in the future a far more noble and more nearly perfect kind of human being will emerge” (LXQJ, 1: 325). 56 Julian Roberts, German Philosophy: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 223. The Nietzsche quote is from Zarathustra and was one no doubt very familiar to Lu Xun.

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towns. His inexplicable refusal to acknowledge the social and especially moral prestige of the degree-holders has already been noted. Given the centrality of neo-Confucian thought—very much as metaphysics—to late Qing political and social order, Ah Q’s views on this count reflect precisely the incipient revolt against the imperial order that later Marxist critics were only too happy to find in him. Of course, what makes Ah Q so compelling a figure is that he was just as apt to be parasitical on the very social order he otherwise treats with disdain, even to the point of actual “revolt.” When he does so, as happens in the preface when he lays temporary claim to the Zhao’s surname, it is likewise to assert his own superiority to the “Budding Talent” (bi xiucai zhang san bei 比秀才长三辈).57 He will also labor in the households of the rich until the opportunity to rob them presents itself, as it does during his stay in town. His antipathy toward the local gentry and the Confucian social order they represent is motivated neither by a Buddhist nor even a Daoist disdain for the (Confucian) secular, for he despises the inhabitants of the local Buddhist convent no less than he does the wealthy Zhaos and Qians. Ah Q will come to stand in opposition to everything—even the revolution he so benightedly embraces for the most ideologically befuddled reasons. This latter opposition is figured in the form of a firing squad, but there can be little doubt for readers in 1920 that despite Ah Q’s apparent and oft-noted display of ressentiment, it was the failure of the revolution that was of paramount critical importance to the author.58 What is needed is perhaps a more nuanced consideration of the problem of revenge in Nietzsche. In On the Genealogy of Morality, compelled by his demanding interlocutor, Mr. Nosy Daredevil confesses, [ W]hat they hate is not their enemy, oh no! they hate “injustice”, “godlessness”; what they believe and hope for is not the prospect of revenge, the delirium of sweet revenge (—Homer early on dubbed it “sweeter than honey”), but the victory of God, the just God over the Godless; all that

LXQJ, 1: 488. “[The revolutionaries will] come marchin’ right in and shout: ‘Let’s go, Ah Q , come with us!’ And I’ll go with them too! Steel maces, bombs, foreign rifles, spears, knives—they will have it all. Then those cocksuckin’ villagers will find out how pitiful they really are. I can see ‘em kneeling on the ground beggin’ me to spare ‘em. Fat chance! (Lu Xun, “Ah Q ,” Lyell trans., 148)” 57 58

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For Nietzsche, where “modern man” failed was in the elaborate metaphysical system he had erected to justify his revenge. The hypocrisy of ressentiment does not lie in the desire to inflict cruelty upon another in compensation of a prior hurt, but rather in the faith that such cruelty is the working of Christian justice and righteousness. What Nietzsche asks to be distinguished is the “tame pet” that is “modern man” who wishes suffering upon his enemy, is unable to accomplish it, and establishes a “spiritual” revenge in which it will be God who makes the enemy pay. There are in Lu Xun’s many stories examples of men (for the most part) wholly given over to such a dehumanizing, negative hypocrisy. My point is not that Lu Xun sought to figure Ah Q’s desire for revenge as something approximating Nietzsche’s more noble (because pre-Christian) Greek ancestors who suffered not an iota of repugnance at the cruelty they sought to inflict upon their enemy, but rather reveled in it.60 Nor need we seek a precise correspondence between neo-Confucian and Christian regimes of ressentiment to grasp the basic fact that whatever Ah Q’s other numerous failings, he does not embody or reflect what was just as much the target of Lu Xun’s cultural critique, namely post-1911 revolution society. Keeping this fact in mind can help us better appreciate Ah Q’s remarkable plasticity as a figure. Marxist critics may well have tended to exaggerate Ah Q’s rebellious nature, but their interpretation is no more lacking in sufficient nuance than those that read Ah Q narrowly from the perspective of Nietzschean ressentiment. A more helpful line of inquiry might begin by

59 Again, in On the Genealogy of Morality: “[A]nyone who clumsily tries to interject the concept ‘revenge’ has merely obscured and darkened his own insight, rather than clarified it (-revenge itself just leads us back to the same problem: ‘how can it be gratifying to make someone suffer?’). It seems to me that the delicacy and even more the tartuffery of tame house-pets (meaning modern man, meaning us) revolts against a truly forceful realization of the degree to which cruelty is part of the festive joy of the ancients and, indeed, is an ingredient in nearly every pleasure they have; on the other hand, how naïve and innocent their need for cruelty appears, and how fundamental is that ‘disinterested malice’ (or to use Spinoza’s words, the sympathia malevolens) they assume is a normal human attribute—: making it something to which conscience says a hearty ‘yes’!” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, 42). 60 “[O]n the contrary, I expressly want to place on record that at the time when mankind felt no shame towards its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is today, with its pessimists. The heavens darkened over man in direct proportion to the increase in his feeling of shame at being man” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, 43).

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bracketing the overly reductive Overhuman/Slave Mentality binary and recognizing that Nietzsche had a vast gallery of types at his critical disposal.61 In other words, Ah Q can be understood more precisely if we are willing to grant that he seems to combine many different features of Nietzsche’s types. How else are we to grasp the fact that Nietzsche’s “active type” is characterized by her capacity of forgetting—something that many commentators have noted in Ah Q. After one of Ah Q’s numerous beatings, the narrator remarks, Fortunately, after the sounds of “whack, whack” had faded away, it was as if the matter was finished for him, and that he felt quite to the contrary, more at ease. Moreover the “faculty of forgetting”—that treasure passed down from our ancestors worked its effect. He walked off and by the time he had reached the wine shop doorway, he was already quite content.62

Of course, this passage occurs immediately after the narrator has noted that this particular beating was “in his memory [ jiyi shang 记 忆上] the second humiliation in his entire life,” offering ironic testimony to his clear inability to adequately recall the past. At this point in the story, Ah Q has already suffered multiple public humiliations. Whatever his other capacities, a “prodigious memory” is not one.63 Cheung acknowledges the “strength” of Ah Q’s “forgetfulness,” but argues that it does not square fully with the desire for revenge Ah Q later displays. As I have suggested above, the problem of revenge is more complex in Nietzsche. More importantly, however, what I am attempting to underscore here is simply that Ah Q has a broader array of Nietzschean dimensions and cannot be reduced to either “the type of master” (endowed with the “faculty of forgetting”) or “the type of slave” (with a “prodigious memory”). Cheung is certainly correct to argue that in fact Ah Q

Jarkkos Tuusvuori has compiled what is perhaps the longest list: “the immoralist, Bildungsphilister [the Cultural Philistine] the Pöbel [the Mob], the Raubthier [the Carnivore], the Wagnerian, the great wise, the Napoleon, the preast [sic], the philosopher, the God, the Jesus and the redeemer, the fanatic, the sceptic, the Caesar, the sophist and the learned, the free spirit, the stoic, the Pharisee, the lawgiver, the Luther, the Zarathustra and the nihilist” ( Jarkkos Tuusvuori, Nietzsche & Nihilism: Exploring a Revolutionary Conception of Philosophical Conceptuality [Academic dissertation, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, 2000]) 247. I have omitted Tuusvuori’s citation of the precise locations of references to these types in Nietzsche’s texts. 62 LXQJ 1: 497. 63 “The type of slave (the reactive type) is defined by a prodigious memory, by the power of ressentiment . . .” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 117). 61

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only achieves his renowned oblivion through his “method of achieving spiritual superiority.” What has sometimes been lost in Ah Q criticism is a more sensitive treatment of the very marked position of the narrator vis-à-vis his subject and the creator of both, Lu Xun. The question must be asked, for whom is Ah Q’s “faculty of forgetting” a form of “self-deception.”64 We can of course, define the “faculty of forgetting” as a craven act of self-delusion, but we make such an evaluation from a perspective on “the type of master,” whose nature it is—that is, at a distant remove from her values. In other words, we need to ask, how would a rural member of the literati living in last days of imperial China evaluate a literal “nobody” with so formidable a capacity to forget his humiliation that he can do so within the time it takes for the sound of the humiliating “whack” to his cranium to fade away? It is surely not left to the pompous figure of the narrator to be able to recognize and positively evaluate this Nietzschean dimension to Ah Q , since he is constitutionally incapable of doing so, by virtue of the values that define his distinctive mode of being.65 Which is why it is left to us, as Ah Q critics, whether mainland (Nietzschean?) Chinese Marxist, or “Western sinologists” like Cheung and myself to recognize this. Ah Q’s “method of spiritual victory” is an evaluation that we must learn to register as definitive of the type who deploys it in his description of Ah Q. It is the product of the narrator’s difference from Ah Q that the “faculty of forgetting” is understood ultimately as a debased, self-delusional “method of spiritual [or psychological] victory.” Would Ah Q’s biographer (not the author of “The True Story”) ever discover anything other in the “master’s” (if not Ah Q’s) “active super-conscious faculty [that] is the faculty of

Deleuze writes, “That is: to whom is an action useful or harmful? Who considers action from the standpoint of utility or harmfulness, its motives and consequences? Not the one who acts: he does not ‘consider’ action. It is rather the third party, the sufferer or the spectator. He is the person who considers the action that he does not perform—precisely because he does not perform it—as something to evaluate from the standpoint of the advantage which he draws or can draw from it . . . We can guess the source of ‘utility’: it is the source of all passive concepts in general, ressentiment, nothing but the requirements of ressentiment” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 74). 65 “Evaluations, in essence, are not values but ways of being, modes of existence of those who judge and evaluate, serving as principles for the values on the basis of which they judge. This is why we always have the beliefs, feelings and thoughts that we deserve given our way of being or our style of life” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1). 64

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forgetting” than simple “self-delusion” to be ridiculed as a “method of psychological victory”?66 Here the point is less to argue Lu Xun’s familiarity with the whole range of Nietzschean cast of types and the multiple varieties of “gruesome hybrids” they embody, than to indicate the extent to which the notion of the type and the concept of typology itself both saturates Nietzsche’s work and takes hold of Lu Xun’s writing.67 It is this element of Nietzsche that most profoundly finds its way into Lu Xun’s Ah Q. With this notion of typology in mind, we can begin to consider what it is precisely that Lu Xun manages to mould and hammer out in Ah Q as a type. There can be little doubt that Lu Xun succeeded in creating a type that was moulded in direct relation to the discourse of the Chinese national character. The complexity of Lu Xun’s relationship to this discourse and the difficult problems it poses for our understanding of Ah Q have nowhere been more deftly illuminated than in the work of Lydia Liu. One of the virtues of Liu’s analysis lies in her sensitivity to the problem of how a Chinese intellectual should respond to the missionary Arthur Smith’s question, “Can China be reformed from within herself ?” As Liu clearly shows, Lu Xun is much more an active “participant in the making of a historical discourse” than he is the first to “discover” and capture fully the essence of the Chinese national character, as so many critics have assumed. Liu illustrates multiple dimensions of the problem as follows: My question in this reading is not To what extent is Ah Q a symbol of national character? or To what extent may he be viewed as a specimen of the lower-class peasant? Rather I ask What are the relationships between the narrator and Ah Q and between the narrator and the people of Wei Village? Where does the question of national identity figure in this scenario?68

66 “Psychology’s mistake was to treat forgetting as a negative determination, not to discover its active and positive character. Nietzsche defines the faculty of forgetting as ‘no mere vis inertiae [force of inertia] as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression, an apparatus of absorption’, ‘a plastic, regenerative and curative force’ ” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 113). 67 Discussing the three varieties of nihilism [ressentiment, bad conscience and the ascetic ideal] in Nietzsche, Deleuze writes: “The spirit of revenge is undoubtedly expressed biologically, psychologically, historically and metaphysically; the spirit of revenge is a type, it is not separable from a typology, the keystone of Nietzschean philosophy” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 34, italics in the original). 68 Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice, 74.

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In other words, there is a series of separations and distances that we must be careful to register precisely if we hope to understand the complex way in which the discourse of national character informs the story as a whole. As I have argued above, even those elements that have long been understood to typify Ah Q (or, more accurately Ah Q’ism) often tell us more about how the narrator evaluates his subject—and hence much more about his very “mode of existence” than they tell us about Ah Q and his. This is because the distance that separates the narrator from Ah Q is the most decisive—indeed, I would argue the only one that matters. Liu is entirely correct to find the narrator “a most peculiar biographer,” largely because of his failure to fulfill his biographical duties and follow Ah Q when the latter absconds into town. But he is peculiar in other ways as well. For a biographer could be forgiven for choosing not to or being unable by circumstance to tail his subject closely throughout the world. The narrator violates his biographical duty to provide a “true account” (zhengzhuan 正传) most of all by assuming the guise of a “third person narrator” able to provide the occasional and highly selective blow by blow account of Ah Q’s mental world, even to the extreme degree of laying claim of biographical witness to Ah Q’s own experience of his annihilation.69 Liu accurately identifies the disjuncture between the narrator as biography author and the narrator as “third person narrator.” But the “omniscience” of this narrator-masquerading-as-biographer does not render him fully extradiegetic, as it would if the character of the self-proclaimed biographer failed completely to make an appearance in the post-preface chapters and was instead immediately and cleanly supplanted by an entirely unfamiliar and unrecognizable (because purely omniscient) “third person narrator.” And yet this is clearly not the case, since narrator-masquerading-as-biographer is volubly present throughout the story, remaining very much a denizen of Wei Village, ever reluctant to leave its narrow confines and making lavish appearances in the expository passages like the one discussed above. For this reason, I would argue that the narrator in fact remains homodiegetic from beginning to end, since despite his predilection for “psycho-narration” and few flights of omniscient narratorial fancy, there is little to distinguish him from his milieu. I have been arguing that it is precisely on

69 Shot, we learn later, “His two eyes had long since gone black. And with a buzz in his ears, he felt as if his entire body had scattered like dust” (LXQJ, 1: 526).

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this count, that he and his fellow Wei Villagers differ most radically from Ah Q. Nearly all that is detailed of Ah Q’s misadventures could readily have been publicly witnessed by not only his biographer, but also by a host of other bystanders and wine shop patrons, since Ah Q remains almost completely exposed throughout. My purpose here is to underscore the degree to which Ah Q emerges as type not only because of the distance that separates him from the narrator (and his fellow Wei Villagers) but also, as I detailed above, from nearly everyone and everything. Precisely for this reason, Liu’s reading is able to carefully tease out of the narrative the ways Lu Xun’s story interrupts and “profoundly supersedes Smith’s totalizing theory of Chinese character and leads to a radical rewriting of the missionary discourse in terms of Chinese literary modernity.”70 What is remarkable about this conclusion is that it stands so starkly at odds with the received tradition of Ah Q criticism that with considerable uniformity sees Lu Xun swallowing whole the discourse of national character without the slightest measure of critical resistance, as though Lu Xun’s Ah Q were the dutiful literary byproduct of an abject submission to Smith’s missionary dictates. Nothing could be less characteristic of Lu Xun, not least as a reader of Nietzsche and translator of Zarathustra. It is often remarked that until just before he died, Lu Xun continually urged that Smith’s Chinese Characteristics be translated into Chinese, in order that Chinese readers might be led “to analyze, question, improve and transform themselves.”71 It is hard to imagine two figures more radically opposed to one another than the American missionary of the Christian faith and the German philosopher who, to use the Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s description, “regard[ed] himself not as one anti-Christ among others, but as the Anti-Christ.”72 Yet there is little indication that Lu Xun ever felt any Liu, Translingual Practice, 76. Quoted in Liu, Translingual Practice, 53. Lu Xun continues: “Rather than clamoring for recognition and praise from others, we must struggle with ourselves and find out what it means to be Chinese.” This latter quote is quite stunning both for what it implicitly states about China’s colonial situation and for what it suggests in the mode of futurity about the control it asserts Chinese-in-becoming can take over the determination/formation of what Chinese are to be/come. There is a revolutionary difference between a world/essence defined so inertly by a fatuous and frankly racist American missionary and the more active project of asserting a provisional measure of sovereign authority over its future formation. 72 Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, “The Spirit of Revenge and the Eternal Recurrence: On Heidegger’s Later Interpretation of Nietzsche,” Nietzsche: Critical Assessments, ed. Daniel W. Conway (New York: Routledge, 1998), III: 148–165, 158. 70 71

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compunction to reconcile the vast intellectual, not to say, metaphysical, distance that separates Smith from Nietzsche, despite the fact that both figures had occupied him to various degrees since the turn of the century and his encounter with both in Japan. Liu is really the first to examine the ways Lu Xun both feels compelled to address Smith’s Chinese Character, yet do so in a manner that fundamentally distances Ah Q from the fate of being a mere composite of Smith’s “characteristics.” What I think Liu tends to overlook is just how firmly and completely grounded Smith’s observations on the Chinese character are in the Christian faith as theology. What China needs is righteousness, and in order to attain it, it is absolutely necessary that she have a knowledge of God and a new conception of man, as well as of the relation of man to God. She needs a new life in every individual soul, in the family, and in society. The manifold needs of China, we find, then, to be a single imperative need. It will be met permanently, completely, only by Christian civilization.73

Only in terms of its constant salvationary dispensation to the Chinese, as potential members of the Christian kingdom of God, does Smith’s “theory of the character of the Chinese” differ from what I have elsewhere examined as Hegel’s philosophical exclusion of the Chinese from history.74 Ultimately, for Smith, the “theory of Chinese character” is reduced, brutally, to the sheer lack of Character, as such. He could hardly be more clear and succinct: “The needs of China, let us repeat, are few. They are only Character and Conscience. Nay, they are but one, for Conscience is Character.”75 As should now be clear, this lack is of an utterly metaphysical nature, linked directly to the Chinese absent relation to the Christian God. Just how much Smith’s own discourse on “Character” is indebted to what I will show in the next chapter as the onto-typo-logical stakes of the Bild (as figure, Gestalt) and which will itself begin to exert so powerful a pull on Chinese criticism beginning in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is clearly indicated by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Here he quotes Wilhelm von Humbolt in a manner that can help us understand the very direct

Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 330. See my “(Para-)humanity, Yellow Peril and the Postcolonial (Arche-)type,” Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy, 9, no. 4, (December 2006) 421–447, 427. 75 Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 320. 73 74

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connection between what we will see is Hegel’s metaphysical determination of Bildung and Smith’s theological conception of Character: “[ B]ut if in our language we say Bildung, we mean something both higher and more inward [than Kultur], namely the attitude of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character.” [. . .] The rise of the word Bildung calls rather on the ancient mystical tradition, according to which man carries in his soul the image [Bild] of God after whom his is fashioned and must cultivate it in himself.76

In other words, the German Romantic appeal to Bildung precisely figures something of a (post-)theological nature and should not be understood, von Humboldt warns, as merely the acquisition of the formal, and purely external, trappings of an education. Or, as we have been all too prone to imagine in Smith, a reformation of Chinese habits. All this is to say that it is essential to understand the true nature of the universality to which Smith lays explicit claim in the Chinese Characteristics. He is, in other words, not merely bigoted in the sense of failing to grasp how his “middle-class, American” values distort his perception of the Chinese, something that might be overcome through a more open embrace of cultural relativism.77 My purpose here is clearly not to suggest that Lu Xun in any fashion subscribed to the “doctrine of Character” as grounded in the Christian faith, since nothing could be further from the truth. What is significant is simply that Lu Xun would choose to fashion a literary retort to Smith in the form of a quasiNietzschean, and hence, (post-)metaphysical type, taking the very first step in the process of China’s assimilation of modern eidaesthetics. Furthermore, we must be clear as well about the vast gulf that separates Lu Xun’s Ah Q as type, from Chiang Kaishek’s description of the Chinese as “zombies” (huosiren 活死人) during the New Life Movement. Dirlik provides Chiang’s litany of Chinese failings. The life of the Chinese at the time, according to Chiang, could be summarized by a few adjectives. Topping the list was unbearable filthiness

Quoted in Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations, 47. Liu quotes Charles W. Hayford who claims that the book suffers from an “immaturity of theory and [from] Smith’s failure to examine his own middle-class American culture in such a way as to understand its relativity” (Quoted in Liu, Translingual Practice, 53). I agree entirely with Liu that the charge of theoretical immaturity obscures Smith’s alignment with earlier 19th century European discourses of national character. 76 77

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chapter two (wusui ) (sic) in every aspect of their lives. Next came “hedonism” (langman), which signified the unprincipled and uncontrolled pursuit of pleasure. Third was “laziness” (landuo); they had no sense of the value of time, were careless, negligent, and irresponsible shirkers. Finally they were “decrepit” (tuitang), physically and spiritually. “To sum up in one word, the average life of Chinese at the present is barbaric ( yeman) and devoid of reason (buheli ).78

What is striking is that Chiang’s rhetoric not only parallels Smith’s, but as I have elsewhere shown, it also displays features of Hegel’s own description of China.79 Begun in 1934, Chiang’s ostensibly new Confucian New Life Movement was very soon handed over to “more American, more Christian” elements of the KMT leadership until the movement was finally placed under the leadership of the American missionary George Shepherd.80 If Ah Q and Chiang’s filthy and barbaric Chinese masses share a generally common origin in a distinctly Christian middle-class American “national character” vision of Chinese people’s distance from the fully, properly human, with Shepherd offering a 1930s social hygienicist upgrade to Smith’s onto-theology, the differences are nonetheless substantial.81 What is essential is that across the very broad spectrum of a century-old modern discourse of China’s congenital deficiencies, from Hegel and Smith, to Lu Xun and Chiang Kaishek, the presumed failings of the Chinese people are in each case figured in relation to some form of metaphysical, whether in its nihilist Christian form, or in its post-enlightenment completion in the figure of Man as species-being and type. Where, as Lydia Liu has shown, Lu Xun accomplishes a far more complex and contestatory rewriting of national character discourse in Ah Q , Chiang’s dimensionless and inert Chinese living dead effectively installs a direct American missionary descendent of Smith’s doctrine of the Chinese character as the basis of the Republican State’s domestic reform agenda. If anything

78 Arif Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution,” The Journal of Asian Studies 34, no. 4 (August 1975): 945–980, 954. 79 Button, “Para-Humanity,” 428–430. 80 Dirlik, “New Life Movement,” 948. 81 I do not wish to discount the degree to which a certain modern conception of Confucianism as a “native morality” ( guyou de daode 固有的道德), especially the slogan “propriety, righteousness, integrity and sense of shame” (li yi lian chi 礼义廉耻) provided the language of indoctrination for the movement. My point is simply that Chiang’s critique of a spiritually and physically decrepit Chinese condition owes its true origins to a modern Christianological critique of “national character.”

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of translingual transformation occurred in the process, it is purely in the service of conservative, quasi-fascist, counter-revolution. 82 In Lu Xun, the neo-Confucian cast of mind that characterizes his narrator is in no way posed as the ultimate philosophical source of salvation for the deficiencies of national character Ah Q embodies, nor especially is Smith’s Christian God. But, as I have been arguing, Ah Q as type, because it emerges in relation to Nietzsche’s (post-)metaphysical typology, does further install the discourse of national character, though in a unique way that will be taken up by later Chinese realism, engendering ever more precise theoretical elaborations of the type (dianxing).

82 Dirlik is carefull to note the correspondences between the New Life Movement and European fascist movements, but likewise presented significant differences. “Nor was [the New Life Movement] able, like the European Fascist Movements with which it shared a great deal in common, to offer the people scapegoats with which to explain the miseries of that existence.” Dirlik also notes that the pious New Life rhetoric lacked both the harsh “tone of hostility and mythmaking” that characterized its European counterparts (Dirlik, “New Life Movement,” 979).

CHAPTER THREE

THE AESTHETIC CRITIQUE OF MODERNITY IN CHINESE MARXISM, NEW CRITICISM, AND ADORNO C. T. Hsia, Human Evil, and the “Living Image of Man” One of the ironic consequences of the failure to critically examine the genealogy of New Criticism that helped to shape the formation of C. T. Hsia’s canon of modern Chinese literature is that the nature of socialist realist literature and aesthetic theory itself remained obscure. The reception of Hsia’s History among supporters and detractors alike, has been premised on the assumption that his political antipathies were so deep-seated that his differences with Chinese leftist theorists of aesthetics and literature were necessarily all the more profound. After all, Hsia himself only barely managed to acknowledge the very existence of the discourse of aesthetics that was to play an increasingly vital role in the sphere of cultural production from the 1940s to just prior to the Cultural Revolution. Zhu Guangqian, for example, is pegged derisively as a “middling aesthetician of the school of Croce,” an assessment with which the later more formidable Marxist theorist of aesthetics Zhu would later become might well have concurred.1 Hu Qiuyuan is invoked as “self-styled liberal well-versed in Marxist aesthetics” a backhanded compliment whose purpose is to heap scorn on the “purile harshness” of the League of Chinese Left-wing Writers.2 The rest of Hsia’s work betrays not the slightest interest, nor, more importantly for our purposes, understanding of what a Chinese Marxist aesthetics might even begin to entail. No doubt, this is the most prominent symptom of the distance that separates the methodological tack of Hsia’s History from the modern concept of literature that I am arguing takes full shape in 20th century

1 Hsia, History, 137. Liu Kang discusses both Zhu Guangqian’s earlier Crocean inspired aesthetics, as well as Zhu’s later, academic Marxist contributions to the debates about aesthetics in the 1950s. Hsia appeared unaware of this second stage of Zhu’s intellectual career. (Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism, 55 and 122–133). 2 Hsia, History, 126–127.

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Chinese literature. What this should suggest is that more than politics was at stake in his inability to grasp anything of the modern Chinese writer’s relationship to aesthetics, Chinese Marxist or otherwise. His wholesale neglect of Chinese Marxist aesthetic theory is more directly the result of his institutional training, which was not predisposed to conceive of the autotelic literary work in relation to almost anything other than itself. Modern Chinese realist literature was programmatically committed to a kind of referentiality New Criticism generally abhorred. But more importantly, modern Chinese literature emerged within the matrix of aesthetics, leading inevitably to the semi-institutionalization in post-liberation China of something New Criticism would only countenance reluctantly, namely the tripartite philosophy-literature-criticism relation. Of course, by the very same token, my interest in Hsia’s History has as much to do with the way its largely unspoken New Critical premises are in fact aligned strikingly with precisely Chinese Marxist aesthetic theory. What I would like to show in this chapter is that the conception of art one finds in the work of the Chinese Marxist Cai Yi in the early 1940s develops out of a critical engagement with a set of concerns about the nature of global capitalist modernity and the beleaguered status of both the aesthetic object and the aesthetic consciousness capable of both creating and recognizing it. My purpose in what follows is much more to examine Cai Yi’s work in relationship to the modern conception of literature in China, arguing that his materialist philosophical aesthetics is very much a necessary consequence of the way the specific concept of literature takes shape in modern China. In other words, the discourse of aesthetics that Cai Yi attempts to systematically formulate in his New Theory of Art and New Aesthetics is animated by many of the same critical concerns that one finds not only in Hsia’s History, but even more abundantly and tellingly in the theoretical work of several of New Criticism’s most important leading figures, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks.3 Given the importance I attribute to Cai Yi’s work as having laid the earliest groundwork for a materialist aesthetics in 20th century China, my interest in both this chapter and the next is in how he understands Cai Yi’s New Theory of Art Xin yishu lun was first published in Chongqing in 1942. His later work, New Aesthetics Xin meixue, appeared in Shanghai in 1948. All references to Cai Yi’s work are from the Cai Yi wenji 蔡仪文集, (Beijing: Zhongguo wen lian chu ban she, 2002). 3

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aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. But what I want to examine in this chapter in particular is the way Cai Yi’s aesthetics participates critically in the same problem of global literary modernity that we find in the gradual formation of North American New Criticism at precisely the same point in history. My focus is therefore upon not only C. T. Hsia as a specific example from modern Chinese literary studies of the larger problem of what I will term, after J. M. Bernstein, “aesthetic modernism,” but also much more broadly with what Chinese Marxist aesthetics shares with the institutionalization of literary criticism, in the United States especially.4 If throughout my analysis, I will highlight the commonalities between Cai Yi and New Criticism, it is by no means my intention to overlook the profound differences between the two. The critical apparatus of Hsia’s New Criticism is grounded in part, as I noted earlier, in an ontotheological conception of human being. Cai Yi, quite to the contrary, and very much like Lu Xun before him, is beholden to what I analyze in the next chapter under the rubric of an onto-typological conception of the human. If Hsia’s New Critical method would have fallen into the category of “metaphysical theories of aesthetics” that Cai Yi discusses in New Theory of Art, it is because Cai is working within an avowedly (post-)metaphysical mode of materialist aesthetics. Before proceeding, I would like to clarify some of what is at stake here in reference to the terms onto-theology and onto-typology, since I have already touched upon them in the introduction, and will examine both in more detail in this and the next chapter. As Lacoue-Labarthe has made clear in his analysis of the modern figure of Oedipus in Freud, Heidegger is an important resource for coming to terms with the modern investment in the figure, the type, and the kind of postEnlightenment deployments of the “mythical” such as one finds with C. T. Hsia.5 4 J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). I explain the term “aesthetic modernism” more fully in the subsequent analysis. Suffice it for the moment to note that it refers to the deployment of aesthetics and aesthetic theory in a critique of an excessively instrumentalized Enlightenment modernity. 5 “Shen Ts’ung-wen posits no supernatural order but affirms the primacy of the mythical imagination, which alone is able to reinstate the wholeness of life in modern society” (Hsia, History, 190). John Crowe Ransom in an essay on Yeats writes of his prior convictions regarding the role of Myth: “There can be no more poetry on the order of its famous triumphs until we come again upon a time when an elaborate Myth will be accepted universally, so that the poet may work within a religious frame which

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chapter three Heidegger has the distinction of having begun to deconstruct the figure of the Worker. In doing so, he began to deconstruct the figural in general, or to deconstruct everything that modern ontology elevated to the rank of Gestalt, figure or type, when abandoning its claim to be an ontotheology, it transformed itself into an onto-anthropology, or as I have suggested elsewhere, an onto-typology. This figure or type is, making due allowance for the reversal of transcendence into ‘rescendence’ (the expression is Heidegger’s) that we can observe in Feuerbach and Marx as well as Nietzsche, a strict equivalent to the Platonic idea.6

As Lacoue-Labarthe shows, Freud’s selection of Oedipus as a “postmythical figure” corresponds precisely to the way Zarathustra serves as the “figure of the Will to Power” in Nietzsche. But we need to be clear about what is meant by the term figure here, since its modern, (post-)metaphysical function draws heavily upon modern philosophical resources. A figure is not simply what it signifies or what we say it means. A figure is a figure only because it imposes itself as such and because it can have that position, or in other words the position of an idea that has been inverted or reversed. A figure necessarily has an ontological status in the metaphysical sense of the term. To put it in different terms: the fact that Oedipus is a figure is not of Freud’s doing, or not just Freud’s doing. It is the result of an ontology that pre-exists Freud.7

What this brief discussion of Lacoue-Labarthe should suggest is that the role of the figure and myth as each are understood and deployed in Cai Yi’s aesthetics and in New Criticism never fully escapes the orbit of

is conventional and therefore objective.” Ransom goes on to say that Yeats proved him wrong, though only in the sense that “we have no common religion, but we have not stopped being religious.” John Crowe Ransom, “Yeats and his Symbols,” Kenyon Review, I, 3 (Summer 1939): 309–322, 310–311 (my emphasis). Cleanth Brooks, as well, in his discussion of John Keats writes, “It has the validity of myth—not myth as pretty but irrelevant make-belief, an idle fancy, but myth as a valid perception of reality” Brooks, “Keats’s Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes,” in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947), 151–166, 164. 6 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Oedipus as Figure,” trans. David Macey, Radical Philosophy, 118 (March/April 2003): 7–17, 8. 7 Lacoue-Labarthe, “Oedipus as Figure,” 8. Emphasis in the original. LacoueLabarthe asks further, “Is this why the two rival figures of our day have something in common? Is the Worker [ Jungerian and Marxian], like Oedipus, a figure and (re)presentation of techne? Does the same knowledge secretly animate both the labouring animal and the desiring animal, and does it run through both political and libidinal economy? If that is the case, we require more than a complete re-evaluation of both socialism and psychoanalysis, their metaphysical status and their scientific destination (or pretentions)” (11).

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metaphysics. New Criticism could afford to be a good deal more open about this fact since the role of religion in the work of Ransom, Tate, and Brooks is so often explicitly affirmed. What is remarkable about C. T. Hsia in this regard is that he so often in the History appeals to metaphysical evil in a manner that calls to mind Ransom and especially Tate’s thoughts on the subject of religion in the American South. This is by no means the place to conduct a comprehensive genealogy of Hsia’s critical method in the History. But several points do need to be made in order to better understand what Hsia and New Criticism as a whole share with Cai Yi. Before turning to Cai Yi, I would like to open up the problem of the complex filiations that link Cai to specific elements of New Criticism. I will broach this problem with a perhaps unlikely source, namely a novel written by Allen Tate in the late-1930s entitled The Fathers. But how many of us know that there are times when we passionately desire to hear the night: And I think we do hear it: we hear it because our senses, not being mechanisms, actually perform the miracles of imagination that they themselves create: from senses come the metaphors through which we know the world, and in turn our senses get knowledge of the world by means of figures of their own making. Nobody today, fifty year after these incidents, can hear the night; nobody wishes to hear it. To hear the night, and to crave its coming, one must have deep inside one’s secret being a vast metaphor controlling the rest; a belief in the innate evil of man’s nature, and the need to face that evil, of which the symbol is darkness, of which again the living image is man alone.8

I want to pause briefly over this passage from Allen Tate’s novel. The novel was written at a crucial time, as Jancovich notes, during 1936 and 1937, a period immediately preceding his efforts with Ransom and others to establish New Criticism.9 It takes place during the Civil War and explores the cultural conflict between the “Old South” and the “capitalist North.” As we will shortly see, what is remarkable about the passage is that it provides a Southern Agrarian novelistic variation of what Cai Yi, writing only a few short years later in wartime Chongqing, terms “image thought” (xingxiang siwei). Cai’s own account, which takes seriously the necessity of a properly philosophical elaboration of the very same “epistemological process” (renshi de guocheng), differs in fact most of all by virtue of its dialectical method. For Tate’s narrator, 8 9

Qtd. in Jancovich, Cultural Politics of New Criticism, 116 (italics mine). Jancovich, Cultural Politics of New Criticism, 115.

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the “miracle of the imagination” that the senses perform is their production of metaphors/figures by means of which we come to know the world. The auditory perception of darkness functions as a synaesthetic figure generated by the imagination, for “man’s” need (craving) to confront the “innate evil” of his “nature.” But what is all the more remarkable, and upon which hinges precisely the onto-theological/onto-typological distinction I have discussed earlier, is that the narrator’s compulsion to “face that evil” resolves itself finally into the “living image of man.” As I have shown in previous chapters, the modern, metaphysical conception of the image of the human enters into modern Chinese discourse with Arthur K. Smith, for whom it finds expression in the Chinese subject’s absent relation to a human soul. Further, as my discussion of Gadamer clarified in chapter two, both the Christian theology and the Enlightenment discourse of subjective formation presuppose that “man carries in his soul the image [Bild ] of God after whom he is fashioned and must cultivate it in himself.”10 What I would like to emphasize here is what I noted Nicholas Brown terms the modern, global “eidaesthetic itinerary”11 of this concept of the figure, its relation to the modern determination of the human and the ontological weight it imposes upon the modern concept of literature. Here, I want also to draw attention to the fact that the conception of evil that shaped Hsia’s History and which provides it the very same onto-theological ground is of the same metaphysical character that one finds in not only Tate’s fictional work The Fathers, but also in his criticism. It is hardly coincidental that Tate puts in an appearance in Hsia’s History at the conclusion of his discussion of Xu Dishan’s 许地山 (Luo Huasheng 落花生) Yu Guan 玉官, the tale of a Chinese Christian convert. Hsia invokes Tate to affirm the “responsibility of the man of letters in the modern world.”12 Hsia quotes Tate’s Forlorn Demon, in which the latter writes, “He must recreate for his age the image of man, and he must propagate standards by which other men may test that image, and distinguish the false from the true.” What Hsia affirms here in Tate as the “image of man” corresponds precisely to what I have been discussing above in terms of the modern figure of the human.

10 11 12

Qtd. in Redfield, Phantom Formations, 47. Bown, Utopian Generations, 12. Hsia, History, 92.

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But what is perhaps most surprising is that Tate’s metaphysical figure of man assumes what can only be described as a fully didactic purpose for “other men” (sic). (Indeed the subtitle of Tate’s Forlorn Demon was “Didactic and Critical Essays.”)13 This is to say that the didactic function of literature inhabits Hsia’s New Critical History in ways that have rarely, if ever, been recognized, and that they do so at precisely those moments in his text in which his critical filiations with the origins of New Criticism are most apparent.14 Just as vitally, however, I want to underscore the filiations between the conception of evil in the passage from The Fathers above, and the role of the equally metaphysical use of it in Hsia’s critical framework. As I noted above, Hsia is just as apt to use it in the mundane sense, such as the “evils” of modern society. Hsia, of course, uses the term evil in standard sociological fashion: ”evils of feudalism,” “evil of imperialism,” or evils produced by the “system” when he wishes to evoke the Chinese leftist writer’s modern humanistic and therefore debased conception of “evil” and the artistic failures such a degraded notion of evil inevitably produces in modern Chinese writing. By virtue of exactly the same onto-theological reasoning, there are metaphysically ramped up usages in which what is at stake is the modern determination of the essence of human nature and which fully call to mind the passage from Tate above. Of Zhang Tianyi, Hsia writes, Few of his contemporaries have grasped so clearheadedly and dispassionately his satiric and tragic view of man’s fundamental perversity and his disposition for evil. The best stories of this author therefore possess a breadth of human truth uncommon in an age of humanitarian didacticism.15

13 Allen Tate, The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and Critical Essays (Chicago: The Folcroft Press, 1953). 14 Of Lu Xun and Guo Moruo, Hsia writes, ”Behind their seemingly diverse artistic credos is inescapably the didactic and patriotic motive” (Hsia, History, 22). My point here has less to do with uncovering Hsia’s self-contradiction, hardly surprising in a work of such vast scope as his. More crucial is recognizing that Hsia does here affirm a quite fundamental—indeed I would argue, truly radical—didactic role for literature at precisely the point where the onto-theological conception of the “image of man” is announced in the words of one of the patriarchs of New Criticism. This has nothing to do with the greater or lesser degrees of didacticism in a Chinese literary work or the extent to which didacticism overwhelms a work’s artistic qualities. Hsia is, after all, affirming explicitly the role of a responsible “modern man [sic] of letters,” both writer and critic. Cai Yi will agree entirely on this point, but as the theorist of a Marxist aesthetics. 15 Hsia, History, 223, italics mine.

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For Hsia, Zhang comes closer than nearly any other Chinese writer to possessing a keen awareness of what Hsia terms in his conclusion Original Sin, a clear measure of Zhang’s relative literary success. We should note as well the dismissive mention of “humanitarian didacticism.” This mundane didacticism is revealed as such by virtue of the fact that its ends are not properly onto-theological, but are, rather, mundanely “humanitarian.”16 For our present purposes it is sufficient to note simply that what is at stake here is real evil, not the modern, sociological version, in which the term evil is invoked only figuratively to reference the vague and sundry ills wrought by “modern life.” This latter radically attenuated and utterly secular variety of “evil” is rendered by Hsia, quite tellingly in the reference to the political: “Reforms and revolutions are rationalistic enterprises, and most satire implies a rationalistic understanding of evil.”17 This line immediately precedes the one I quoted in my introduction, in which Hsia diagnoses modern Chinese literature’s overall weakness in terms of the Chinese writer’s absent relation to the doctrine of Original Sin.18 We should understand, therefore, that any literary or artistic practice that serves the ends of “reforms and revolutions” is condemned to contend only with pallid, rationalized conceptions of “evil” in which, as the passage from Tate’s The Fathers suggests, the human imagination plays no

16 “For instance, the conservative New Humanists and the combative Southern Agrarians [Tate, Ransom, Brooks] faulted mainstream Protestantism for reducing Christianity to humanitarianism” (D. G. Hart, “When Is a Fundamentalist a Modernist? J. Gresham Machen, Cultural Modernism, and Conservative Protestantism” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65, 3 [Autumn 1997]: 605–634, 622). Hsia’s references to “humanitarianism” are uniformly dismissive, especially as regards its baleful role in the creative literary process. A rejection of modern New Deal humanitarianism was an article of faith among nearly all the Southern Agrarians and founders of New Criticism—something derived ultimately from T. E. Hulme. Cleanth Brooks, in an essay entitled “A Plea to the Protestant Churches,” writes, “But in proportion as Protestantism becomes a mere humanitarianism (or by emphasis a humanitarianism) it will have less and less to disagree with the communist program” (Who Owns America: A New Declaration of Independence, ed. Herbert Agar and Allen Tate [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936], 323–333, 329). My point would be that much of the specific rhetorical form of Hsia’s vociferous anti-communism derives directly from the writings of the fathers of New Criticism. 17 Hsia, History, 504. 18 “[O]r,” Hsia adds, “some comparable religious interpretation of evil.” Quite clearly, a traditional Buddhist conception of evil is not what Hsia is looking for. Confucianism, for reasons I noted in the first chapter with reference to Anthony Yu, was an even less likely candidate for Hsia.

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part.19 Worse, “the basic evil of Communism” lies in the fact that its effective ban on any conception of, and hence any truly imaginative literary reflection upon, “man’s” essential predisposition to evil denies its adherents the sole possibility of realizing what Tate terms, in the same essay Hsia quotes above, the “full substance of his humanity.”20 The problem with Hsia’s “Communism” is thus not merely political, but both literary and existential, as well. What Ross Labrie writes of Tate applies fully, I would argue, to Hsia’s conception of the relationship between literature and evil: For Tate a significant part of the holistic approach taken by religion, particularly by medieval Christianity, was its unblinking consciousness of evil, which he regarded as the most valuable contribution of Catholicism to the modern age, where he witnessed evil being explained out of existence by scientist and neoscientist alike. In this respect, in an essay titled “To Whom is the Poet Responsible?” he acknowledged the usefulness not only of religion but also of poetry in thwarting the attempt to “‘purify ourselves of the knowledge of evil.’”21

What is crucial here is the way all forms of modern secularism—Chinese communism being Hsia’s most egregious example—occludes the modern writer’s internal reflection upon Original Sin. It is least of all surprising that the one writer who most completely realizes a literary vision that fully grasps this fundamental awareness of a fallen human nature would be Eileen Chang. It is probably not an exaggeration to suggest that for Hsia, Zhang’s Cao Qiqiao 曹七巧 in the Golden Cangue 金锁记 is the most consummately and perhaps even the one truly fallen character in the whole of modern Chinese literature. Hsia is remarkably attentive to the corrupting role “the society in which [Qiqiao] moves” plays in forming her “peculiar cruelty and meanness.” (Hsia, History, 407) But her obscene demise and the devastation she wreaks upon all around her finds no real explanation in her being “the product of her

19 For Tate, modern Reason’s vision of an Utopian future deprives the artistic sensibility of its sole access to human’s nature’s “immitigable evil” (Allen Tate, Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas [ Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1968], 1020. “For the Golden Age is not a moral or social possibility; it is a way of understanding the problem of evil, being a picture of human nature with the problem removed. It is a qualitative fiction, not a material world, that permits the true imagination to recognize evil for what it is” (Allen Tate, Reactionary Essays, 98). 20 Tate, Forlorn Demon, 9. 21 Ross Labrie, The Catholic Imagination in American Literature (University of Missouri Press, 1997), 54. Tate converted to Catholicism in 1950.

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environment” nor in some bizarre proclivity to evil passions. Rather, her evil shares the tragic onto-theological dimension of Tate’s narrator above what one critic has termed the “fatal attraction to evil.”22 Marxist and Southern Agrarian Criticism on the Cultural Predations of Positivism As Tate notes above, modern secularism offers a spiritually anemic and diminished portrait of the human “with the problem [of evil] removed.” One finds in the work of Tate and Ransom traces of Hsia’s conviction that Chinese communism was simply the soft liberalism of modern Western social democracy purged cleanly of any doubts about innate human weakness and perversity. For Hsia, the mere concept of the infinite capacity of the human to realize perfection was not only politically dangerous; worse, it was based on a fundamental misconception of the essence of human being. But Hsia’s reading of communism as a mere quantitative exacerbation of a flawed modern liberal, secular humanist premise failed fundamentally to grasp the nature of the Marxist ideology that for both him and his brother Tsi-An Hsia had tragically far too many Chinese writers of their generation in its malignant thrall. Nowhere is that failure more robustly apparent than in his symptomatic blindness to the one element of modern Chinese cultural critique to take seriously all the eviscerating ravages upon the “full substance” of the human wrought by modern capitalism’s instrumentalist conception of human reason. For what modern positivism effected was the diremption of the human faculties of the mind, radically atrophying the formative, poeitic, and cognitive dimensions of the aesthetic faculty of the imagination in humbled deference to the virile, totalizing ambitions of modern instrumentalizing reason. Such was the shared conviction of not just the Southern Agrarian strain of Hsia’s North American New Criticism, but Chinese Marxist aesthetic criticism as well.23 Indeed, as 22 A. M. Tibbetts, “Allen Tate’s The Fathers: The Fatal Attraction of Evil,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 12 (1967): 155–163. 23 On this count, there are very important and compelling historical comparisons with the New Period during the 1980s. See for example Jing Wang’s sensitive analysis of similar problems in the “cultural critique movement.” See especially chapters two and four in her High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley University Of California Press, 1996).

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I will now show, Marxism’s fundamental attunement to this problem throughout the twentieth century was such that Cai Yi would comment in the 1991 revised edition of New Aesthetics, that, [i]n the modern era, as a result on the one hand of the development of the various special branches of positivist natural sciences and the advocacy of an emphasis on abstract thought, combined further with the excessive emphasis upon the laws of formal logic, abstract thought (chouxiang siwei 抽象思维) and image thought (xingxiang siwei ) gradually split apart. Especially since the latter part of the 19th century, during the period of decline of capitalist philosophy and aesthetics, the two gradually fell into a state of complete isolation, as if it had become an insurmountable contradiction.24

I will shortly discuss in more detail the nature of this “contradiction” concerning positivism. But we must first consider what is historically at stake in Cai’s narrative. How and on what terms does China participate in this modern crisis of the human cognitive powers? Cai, for very necessary reasons, writes from the perspective of a universal, collective bequest of philosophical thought, as though he were receiving the problem of the split between image thought and abstract thought as the collective patrimony of human history. Cai’s treatment of the problem consistently excludes anything of the culturalist explanation of “Western influence” and rather presupposes the systemic nature of capitalism’s global penetration of all spheres of human endeavor, including especially art, literature, and aesthetics. One strongly senses in Cai’s work the conviction that the nature of modern capitalism is of far greater significance in answering the question of why 20th century China suffers from the same dangerous inflation of the positivist sciences’ authority in modern life that New Criticism likewise bemoaned. This link between capitalism, a predatory positivism, and finally fascism features prominently in a paper Tate delivered entitled “The Present Function of Criticism.” I quote Jancovich’s précis of Tate’s argument. [Tate] claims that the society of modern capitalist America is a “mass society”, and he identifies it as totalitarian in nature. In this way, modern America, it is argued, has much in common with the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy. The growth of totalitarianism is also directly associated

24 Cai Yi, Xinmeixue, gaixieben 新美学改写本 (New Aesthetics, rev. edn.) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue yuan, 1991), 157. New Aesthetics was originally published on the eve of liberation in 1948.

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chapter three with the extinction of critical thought and with positivistic philosophies which overestimate the importance of instrumental action.25

Such sentiments were widely shared across the political spectrum of the New Critics, from Tate and Ransom on the Right to Rahv, Howe, and Steiner on the Left.26 It is important to recognize just how strongly Chinese Marxists like Cai Yi identified with the critique of instrumental reason. From his dialectical materialist perspective, capitalism’s imposition of a positivism on all of the sciences including aesthetics necessarily meant a perniciously abstract regard for human being as such. Cai’s aesthetics thus shares with New Criticism an urgent sense of a crisis in modern thought. For both, the decisive problem was the relation between the natural sciences and the human sciences. For the Marxist Cai Yi, the resolution of this contradiction was to decide the destiny of the essence of the human. In the quote above, Cai evokes a vivid sense of an originary holism in human consciousness that is riven in two by the triumphant rise of especially “19th century capitalist philosophy and aesthetics.” Prior to the emergence of capitalist modernity, it is humanity as such that shares in some form this originary consciousness. Implicit in Cai’s discussion is the equation between, on the one hand, the rending of human thought into the two separate and unequal spheres of abstract and image thought occuring in the West following the rise of bourgeois positivist science and, on the other, the same rending of the human cognitive functions in China after that positivist faith has successfully globalized itself in the service of imperialism. In Cai’s sense, China becomes yet another site for the battle first waged between an overweening, late-19th century positivism and the project of the moral sciences

Jancovich, Cultural Politics of New Criticism, 100. In this context of a discussion of Cai Yi’s own critique of capitalist positivism, it is equally important to recall just how much more immediately pressing this form of critique of totalitarian fascism was for Marxists in China in 1941, who had already endured nearly a decade and a half of the KMT’s White Terror. While some might question Tate’s equation of New Deal America with Hitler’s Germany—a standard right-wing trope in the U.S. at the time—the distinction between communism and fascism for a Marxist like Cai Yi was quite understandably vast. But so was the political and cultural distinction between Marxist thought and the capitalist world it sought to critique. Both of these distinctions are all but entirely absent in the whole of Hsia’s History and for the very same reason, namely Hsia’s refusal to engage modern Chinese aesthetic theory. 25 26

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(Geisteswissenschaften Wilhelm Dilthey’s German translation of the term from Mill’s A System of Logic).27 In Europe, it will be natural scientist Herman von Helmholtz, who will grant to the human sciences a certain limited value. In a speech entitled “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” Helmholtz discusses the need to complement the forward march of scientific reason with “progress [in the] legal, political, and moral sciences, and [in] the accessory historical and philological studies,” since the development of “the moral discipline of individual citizens” is equally imperative to the survival of the nation. Helmholtz writes that absent this attention to the human sciences, a nation is “surely . . . on the high road to destruction.” And yet, while Helmholtz explicitly acknowledges the hazards to the nation of too presumptuous a pride in the accomplishments of the natural sciences, only implicitly is he willing to grant that the same preoccupation with the material achievements of the sciences undergird the structure of relations between nations, or more precisely between the European colonial powers and the colonized modern-nations-in-formation. The human sciences require the support of national governments merely to round out and better augment the power of the individual nation state against others, whether in competition at home among the European nations or in the project of imperialism abroad. Accordingly every nation is interested in the progress of knowledge on the simple ground of self-preservation, even were there no higher wants of an ideal character to be satisfied; and not merely in the development of the physical sciences, and their technical application, but also in the progress of legal, political, and moral sciences, and of the accessory historical and philological studies. No nation which would be independent and influential can afford to be left behind in the race.28

The pursuit of the agenda of the human and moral sciences is therefore crucial primarily to the project of national interest. Helmholtz clearly sees the need to dispense with any purely altruistic motives in fostering the human sciences. The “legal, political, and moral sciences” are needed especially since it is not possible “to make good soldiers except out of men who have learnt under just laws to educate the sense of Joel Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 67. 28 Hermann von Helmholtz, Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 92. 27

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honor that characterizes an independent man, certainly not out of those who have lived [as] the submissive slaves of a capricious tyrant.”29 The moral sciences are the sole adequate means to achieve the hegemony needed to advance the national interest in the international arena of competing nation-states engaged in colonialism abroad. I make this point only to underscore the fact that the crisis of positivism provoked by modern capitalism arrives in and is made crucially relevant to China precisely via imperialism. Thus for China, the problem of the relation between the material, natural sciences and the human, moral sciences assumes a double hegemonic significance. China is compelled to respond to this crisis and to formulate a means to overcome the conflict between the natural and the human sciences in Europe precisely because the “high road to destruction” this crisis engenders leads inevitably abroad through colonialism. For the Southern Agrarians in the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s, the very same positivist sciences that powerfully buttressed the project of colonialism and the material conquest of the globe had arrived earlier in the American South with the invading Union armies from the industrial North. For Tate, this historical process spelled a tragic end to the Old South as the sole true historical remnant of European feudalism, while for Chinese Marxists the deathblow it delivered to Chinese feudalism could be celebrated, as it was with Marx. In China, the crisis in 20th-century thought produced not merely an equal and opposite reaction in the non-West of nation building educational policies emphasizing science, technology, and military power. Indispensible to the success to the project of resistance to imperialist predation is the recognition that this crisis impinges fundamentally upon the essence of human being. In short, for Cai this crisis arrives from without in the wake of capitalism’s globalization of itself—in China’s case, assuming initially the form of colonialism. Cai’s philosophical aesthetics is premised upon the conviction that the resolution of this crisis is vital to the formation of the modern Chinese subject, one free of positivism’s intrinsic tendency to atrophy the fully human cognitive potential of the aesthetic. Precisely on this count, Cai’s project of a philosophical aesthetics is powerfully animated by the very same set of ideological concerns that

29

Helmholtz, Science and Culture, 92.

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first drew the “Twelve Southerners” together in I’ll Take My Stand.30 In the case of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and later Cleanth Brooks, the main problem was to articulate a conception of the aesthetic object in opposition to the rigid instrumentality modern scientific positivism had imposed first of all, for them, on a vanquished American “Old South” and more generally upon the modern world at large. In order to do so, Cai Yi’s New Critical contemporaries in the United States had first to account for precisely the kind of rupture of the faculties of the human mind that Cai articulates above. In an article published in 1963 deeply sympathetic to Tate’s critical work, R. K. Meiners writes, “Sensibility” is, then, for Tate, not the emotions as opposed to the intellect, and the dissociation of sensibility is more than the divorce of thought and feeling, or even the loss of a “direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling.” By “sensibility” Tate means, in short, the ability to “see”: to perceive and represent the intricate relationships between the mind and the world in concrete form.31

Both Tate and Cleanth Brooks draw upon T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “dissociation of sensibility” as a way of grasping what the (merely, materially) victorious North had imposed upon the South beginning with Reconstruction after the Civil War. On a far more general historical level, Tate, again following T. S. Eliot, pegs the 17th century as the period in which the human mental faculties were initially sundered from one another.32 In the very essay that I noted C. T. Hsia quotes in the History, Tate links this dissociation of sensibility to the philosophical figure of Descartes.

30 Apart from Ransom and Tate, the “twelve Southerners” were Donald Davidson, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Gould Fletcher, Lyle H. Lanier, Herman Clarence Nixon, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, John Donald Wade, Henry Blue Kline, and Stark Young. Virginia Rock provided brief biographical essays for each [I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978]). 31 R. K. Meiners, “A TCL Bonus: [Allen Tate] The Center: Unity and Dissociation,” Twentieth Century Literature, 9: 1 (April 1963): 54–79, 57. 32 “In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as is natural, was aggravated by the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.” Kenneth Asher notes that over the years Eliot gradually “loosened” the link between a “dissociation of sensibility” and the poets, Dryden and Milton, broadening the historical and political significance of the phrase by linking it to the English Civil War. Kenneth Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 129. Eliot first makes the claim in his 1921 essay, “The Metaphysical Poets.”

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chapter three When René Descartes isolated thought from man’s total being he isolated him from nature, including his own nature; and divided man against himself . . . The battle is now between the dehumanized society of secularism, which imitates Descartes’ mechanized nature, and the eternal society of communion of human spirit.33

It goes very much without saying that Cai Yi’s own approach to the problem and indeed his conclusions especially as regards revolutionary political practice will differ dramatically from the New Critics, as well. As I noted above, one of the most important differences lies in Cai’s dialectical method. Cai’s embrace of the dialectic presupposes not only the historical transformation of human social and political institutions, but also a transformation of human being itself. Despite their efforts to historicize the “dissociation of sensibility,” the New Critics did not feel compelled to jettison their convictions about the static nature of the essence of the human. Human history may well have had the capacity to sunder human being into disparate “warring” faculties, but human nature itself remained onto-theologically, permanently fallen. As Meiner notes in his analysis of Tate, Tate again attacks industrialism, this time for having furnished provincialism without regionalism. The contemporary world, at the Second World War, is more provincial than it has been at any other time in its history: we proliferate Utopian solutions, and solve nothing. The advancement of technology will not solve the dilemmas of human existence, for human nature is permanent. When one manifestation of the perpetual problem of being a man is eliminated, another will take its place.34

I would like here to underscore the more immediate and obvious difference between Tate’s conception of a “permanent human nature” and the conception of human nature clearly at work in Chinese Marxism. This issue is addressed directly by C. T. Hsia in his discussion of Mao Zedong 毛泽东. Of the so-called subjective writers who have retained illusions about love, for example, [Mao] has much to say: “Now how about love? In a class society there is only class love. Yet these comrades [petty bourgeois Communists] look for some kind of super-love which transcends classes: they seek an abstract love, as well as abstract freedom, abstract truth, abstract human nature, etc.”35

33 34 35

Tate, The Forlorn Demon, 5. Meiners, “The Center: Unity and Dissociation,” 75, italics mine. Hsia, History, 309.

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Hsia then comments, bringing his otherwise ideological adversary of Hu Feng 胡风 to his rhetorical aid: In lieu of a literature that serves truth and goodness, embraces all humanity, and attacks all institutions of cruelty for the greater dignity of the human individual—in other words, the kind of literature envisioned by Hu Feng—Mao Tse-tung endorses the kind of literature that is merely the subservient instrument of the Communist Party.36

In my final chapter, I will return to the problem of “class love” in an analysis of Luo Guangbin 罗广斌 and Yang Yiyan’s 杨益言 Hongyan 红岩 (Red Crag). It should be apparent here, however, that Mao is asserting more than merely the CCP’s submission of literature to its arbitrary dictates. Even if it would be foolish to deny precisely this perlocutionary effect of Mao’s description of the literary scene, we risk fundamentally misconstruing what is at stake in the descriptive moment of Mao’s diagnosis. More importantly, we would fail—as I am arguing we have in modern Chinese literary studies—to recognize that Hsia is compelled to completely recast Mao’s comments as a bid for totalitarian control of the literary scene because, symptomatically, Hsia has touched upon an area in which he shares the most with Mao. Put another way, we risk as well failing to see what Mao’s impatience with leftist Chinese writers’ collective inability to examine human nature in any other than “abstract” terms shares with New Criticism. If Tate and Hsia consistently display a tendency to reify “human nature,” that hardly compels us to further reify the “ideological” binary distinction between a “permanent human nature” and a “doctrine of the perfectibility of human nature.”37 This distinction was, after all, the one the Ransom, Tate, and Brooks could only grasp as a static opposition-as fixed and permanent as their onto-theological conception of human nature itself. Ironically, for Hsia, as much for his mentors, no operation of the human mind interfered more disruptively in the

Hsia, History, 309. John Crowe Ransom, God Without Thunder: an Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (Hamden: Archon Books, 1965), 133. It is here perhaps that the supplementary function of New Criticism’s onto-theology is most decisive and clear. For Tate’s (and Hsia’s) metaphysical conception of the human demands an explanation as to why this final, abstract opposition can never be overcome. In precisely the Heideggerian sense, they must smuggle in a theological explanation to round out their modern, metaphysical theory of the human. See Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Modern Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1969) 42–74, 71. 36

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process of understanding “man” in his full, substantial being, than precisely such an act of abstraction. That this suspicion of abstraction is a fundamental tenet of Cai’s dialectical aesthetics will be more than apparent below. But what Tate, Brooks, and Hsia necessarily lacked was the ability to comprehend the opposition between a (doctrine of a) “permanent human nature” and the “doctrine of human perfectibility” dialectically, as was demanded by methodological default by both Mao and Cai.38 (I provisionally exclude Ransom, who is in fact partially aligned with Mao Zedong and Cai for reasons that will become apparent below.) In the case of Hsia, I would point to the following passage from his discussion of Mao Dun: Although one cannot be sure whether, at the time of the composition of the trilogy [Eclipse, Disillusion, and Vacilation], Mao Tun has consciously followed the axioms that the will is a necessarily corrupting agent and that politics directed toward the achievement of an abstract good can only turn out to be evil if it provides no safeguards against evil passions, the pessimism of The Eclipse does seem to be imbued with an imaginative apprehension of these truths.39

Or, again, in Hsia’s quite favorable discussion of Chiang Kwei’s 姜贵 Whirlwind: These two leaders fail because in Chiang Kuei’s scheme, their quarrel with Chinese society is fundamentally an expression of disgust not so much toward the glaring national evils as towards the human condition itself, and no revolution can succeed at the price of abolishing the unique and at times intolerable burden and responsibility of being human. In advocating Communism, Fang Hsiang-ch’ien 方祥千, like K’ang Yu-wei 康有为, Sun Yat-sen 孫逸仙 (孙中山), and many other late Ch’ing intellectuals before him, stands convicted of utopianism, the folly of attempting to replace natural familial and social bonds with an abstract, and supposedly far happier and more equitable, human order.40

38 In Hegel’s terms, the opposition between the two doctrines remains abstract so long as they remain fixed by the Understanding (Verstand ) in their mutual exclusion. For Hegel this is an absolutely necessary step, but must be followed by the work of negativity in the subsequent stages of first negative and then positive reason (Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences [1830], trans. William Wallace, with foreword by J. N. Findlay [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 113–121). 39 Hsia, History, 146. 40 Hsia, History, 557.

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What I would like to draw attention to here is the way the problem of abstraction is posed in each of these passages. My purpose here is to underscore the fact that Mao Zedong’s diatribe against “abstract love, as well as abstract freedom, abstract truth, abstract human nature” emerges ultimately from precisely the same resistance to what is likewise for Hsia the dehumanizing ravages of modern positivism. Hsia’s “abstract good” and “abstract . . . human order” are fundamentally part of the very same critical register as Mao’s “abstract love” and “abstract freedom.” Mao’s emphasis on the category of class as a function of the historical development of capitalism merely speaks the necessity of analyzing human love, human good, or human freedom in concrete, historical terms. The problem itself, namely the tendency toward what Lukács terms “isolating abstraction” in modern thought, animates the project of New Criticism no less powerfully than Chinese Marxist aesthetics. On this count, it is helpful to recall what is well known about Lukács: Lukács necessarily regards positivism as the typical philosophy of capitalism. But what should the affinity between natural science and capitalism mean? For Lukács, it basically means that capitalism produces phenomena in reality in the same way as natural science produces its “pure” facts in the cognitive sphere. Both spheres resort to the method of isolating abstraction when a phenomenon of the real world is placed (in thought or in reality) into an environment where its laws can be inspected without outside interference . . . [N]atural science represents a type of rationality that is the historical product of the capitalist organization of society.41

In the earlier quote above, Mao Zedong is very explicitly taking critical aim at the conception of a “permanent human nature” noted above with Tate a conception Hsia fully endorses. But the fact that this one element of New Critical cultural theory is indeed reified in a manner that Cai, Mao, and Lukács all categorically and dialectically reject should not obscure for us the fundamental fact that what Lukács says above regarding capitalist, positivistic philosophy’s production/reduction of every other thing to “‘pure’ facts” aligns the Chinese and Hungarian Marxists very closely with the Chinese and American New Critics. If, from Lukács’ perspective, a static human nature was the final reified “fact” the Southern Agrarians could never admit into the Waste Land 41 János Kelemen, “Philosophy of Science and its Critique in Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness,” in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics, ed. Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tarr (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 43.

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of instrumentalized modern experience, viewing it as they did as a transcendental a priori, the reason simply lies in their onto-theological, metaphysical conception of the human. My point is that C. T. Hsia tends to view Chinese Marxist thought as primarily positivistic, with an insidious tendency toward abstraction. We must, of course, distinguish this claim from critiques within Marxism of positivist, because anti-dialectical, strains of Marxist thought.42 It goes without saying that this was not a topic of interest for Hsia, but his neglect of the issue is not without critical consequences. For there was much in the very critical tradition in which he was trained and to which one can be reasonably certain he was exposed, that would very likely have led to an encounter with precisely the kind of aesthetic theory Cai Yi formulated in the early 1940s. In short, communism for Hsia was required to stand in for what in New Criticism was comprehensively understood as the positivisitic, instrumentalized, scientific rationality of mercantile capitalism, ever prone to a dehumanizing imposition of abstraction upon genuine, concrete human experience. Cleanth Brooks, like nearly all of his New Critical colleagues, as along with Lukács and Adorno, understood that the rise of an instrumental human reason given to abstraction was historically linked to the modern capitalism. Indeed, the whole of I’ll Take My Stand is saturated with a rejection of the destruction of culture at the hands of “industrial capitalism,” not just for Allen Tate and John Crow Ransom, but also for the other ten “Southern Agrarians.”43 Thus when Hsia writes, for example, that “perhaps the type of mind which takes to the oversimplifying formulas of Marxism is naturally of an abstract order, incapable of much interest in the fascinating concrete phenomena pertaining to human existence,” it is difficult not to sense more than mere ignorance of Chinese Marxist aesthetics. As a student of Cleanth Brooks, Hsia was surely well aware that New Criticism was founded on a cultural critique of capitalism, albeit a non-dialectical materialist one. It is thus not difficult to detect in Hsia’s treatment of Communism as the main culprit of abstract reason running brutally roughshod over modern

42 See Kenneth Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995). Anderson examines the importance of Lenin’s late encounter with “true” dialectic in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Lenin’s philosophical notebooks were widely read in China. 43 See Jancovich, Cultural Politics, 24–62.

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Chinese human beings the structure of what Zizek terms disavowal.44 In other words, “I know that communism emerged as a doctrine seeking to restore to human beings the ‘full substantial being’ the instrumentalized abstractions of modern capitalism has deprived them of, but still I will write the History ‘as if ’ it were really Chinese Communism that sought was to impose that deprivation.” This accounts in part for why nothing of New Criticism’s robust cultural critique of modern capitalism ever enters the scene in the History. And very much as a necessary corollary, nor does anything of Cai Yi’s awareness that the diremption of modern consciousness arrived in China in the form of colonialism and that any critical response to that dilemma demanded first a dialectical materialist account of China’s “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” status. Precisely here, on this point it is vital to recall that the relationship between the New Criticism and Marxist critique was hardly coincidental. Indeed, Adorno in 1945 published an essay in the Kenyon Review, the journal founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom. Douglas Mao notes that the thematic correspondence between Ransom and the Frankfurt School was anything but coincidental and is only surprising at first glance. Douglas Mao writes, Though Adorno, with his contempt for the volkisch, could scarcely have accommodated Ransom’s short-lived early nostalgia for “the old agrarian life,” the two share a mistrust of subjectivity inextricable from a sense of anguish over the reckless and destructive transformations made possible by accelerating technological capacity. Although the two unquestionably developed their positions independently, they did not fail to take (limited) note of their convergence: when Adorno contributed an article to the fall 1945 Kenyon Review entitled “Theses Upon Art and Religion Today,” Ransom wrote in response, in the same number, that Adorno’s theme is “one that has a great urgency for us: the unhappy human condition that has risen under the modern economy, and the question of whether religion and art can do anything about it”—a theme that might be described as Ransom’s own.45

44 For Zizek, fetishistic disavowal involves the “as if ” (als ob). “‘I know very well, but still. . . .’ To the current exemplifications of this formula (‘I know that Mother has not got a phallus, but still . . . [believe she has got one]’; ‘I know the Jews are people like us, but still . . . [there is something in them]’ we must undoubtedly add also the variant of money: ‘I know that money is a material object like others, but still . . . [it is as if it were made of a special substance over which time has no power]’” (Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology [ London: Verso, 1989], 18). 45 Douglas Mao, “The New Critics and the Text-Object,” English Literary History, 63, 1 (1996): 227–254, 233.

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As Mao further notes, apart from other differences, both were “grounded in a profound mistrust of the transformations of life occurring in the age of the commodity” and, one should add, its fetishistic character under capitalism.46 Needless to say, it was rather unlikely that Hsia would ever have taken up the study of Chinese Marxism, given the McCarthyite cultural climate in which he was acquiring his New Critical training and the abiding antipathy toward communism Brooks, Ransom, and Tate all harbored. My interest lies rather in the fact that it was precisely his conflation of Chinese Communism as simply the extreme (“diabolical”) form of modern positivist science as Utopian political project that prevented him and as a consequence, several generations of his more sympathetic readers, from recognizing that Chinese Marxist aesthetics took as its point of critical departure the desire to rescue the sensuous concrete from the predatory clutches of the modern positivist philosophy’s abstraction, globalized in the wake of capitalism. Thus, one the History’s most telling failures is its devout refusal to provide even the most meager account of the Chinese Marxism that was to play so decisive a role in shaping the course of not only the history of modern Chinese literature, nor even simply modern Chinese history (as if even the first consideration were not reason enough for Hsia to take it seriously), but the whole of 20th-century history around the globe. And yet it would hardly be fair to single Hsia out on this count, since as I noted earlier the effective banishment of continental philosophy from North American departments of philosophy after World War II made a working grasp of Marxist aesthetic theory considerably more difficult. Ransom’s engagement with Adorno was hardly sufficient for a grasp of dialectics—“negative” or otherwise. It must nonetheless be said, that Hsia’s failure on this count inevitably had a lasting impact on the field of modern Chinese literature, for the History’s disavowed misapprehension of Chinese Marxism as a modern positivism run ideologically amok, authorized a neglect of Chinese Marxist aesthetics that would remain securely in place in North America until the pioneering work of Liu Kang and Wang Ban, some forty years later. Certainly on this count, Hsia proved himself no more able as a literary historian and critic to “carve his own path in defiance of the Zeitgeist” of the Cold

46

Douglas Mao, “The New Critics,” 235.

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War McCarthyite United States than the Chinese writers he judged largely deficient if, nonetheless, sincere.47 My purpose thus far has been to examine the way Hsia’s critical method draws upon key features of Tate and Ransom’s contributions to New Criticism. And yet my larger concern is with the problem of better situating Cai Yi’s Chinese Marxist aesthetics in relation to the North American New Criticism of Tate and Ransom. Doing so will help to further clarify both what Chinese Marxist aesthetics shared with New Criticism in the middle decades of the 20th-century and in precisely which ways they differed so radically. For that the differences have long been taken as a simple matter of course. That the diametrical opposition between C. T. Hsia and Mao Zedong has, after all, long seemed an almost naturally given “fact” does not for that matter mean we have properly understood their differences. Concrete Universality and the Critique of Aesthetic Modernity in Cai Yi and John Crowe Ransom As I have argued above, alongside capital’s global circulation, a variety of cultural critiques of capitalism itself emerge during the middle decades of the twentieth century. If this critique is registered comprehensively within especially that strain of New Criticism with which C. T. Hsia was most closely aligned, it differed necessarily from the one that took shape in Chinese Marxism. It is important to recall that the problem of literature in its modern institutional configuration will call upon the philosophical resources of modern aesthetics. Thanks largely to the work of Liu Kang and Wang Ban, the field of modern Chinese literature is now quite familiar with the considerable degree to which the problem of modern Chinese literature became intertwined with modern aesthetic theory. What is less well known is the extent to which Hsia’s own institutional formation drew upon a variety of New Criticism that engaged modern aesthetics as well. As I will show in what follows, the overlap of critical concerns between Chinese Marxist aesthetics and New Criticism is all the more remarkable given how long Hsia writes, “No modern writer possessed enough compelling genius and imagination to carve out his own path in defiance of the Zeitgeist; but the writers of talent and integrity, while espousing those ideals, also serve in their fashion, often reluctantly and in spite of themselves, the Holy Ghost” (Hsia, History, 499). 47

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in modern Chinese literary studies the two have been deemed distantly separated critical universes. How then does Cai Yi’s Marxist aesthetics take up the problems discussed above, namely the need to reintroduce via aesthetics the cognitive dimension of concrete sensuous particularity? Given the importance of dialectical materialism in the case of Cai, it will be helpful to begin with a quote from Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, written in the late teens.48 Lenin is here commenting on the embedded quote drawn from Hegel’s Science of Logic. In a burst of enthusiasm, Lenin writes, “A beautiful formula: ‘Not merely an abstract universal, but a universal which comprises in itself the wealth of the particular, the individual, the single.’ (all the wealth of the particular and single!)!! Tres bien!”49 I begin with Lenin’s gushing over a passage from Hegel’s formidable Science of Logic in order to indicate the trajectory Chinese aesthetics will take beginning especially with Cai Yi’s work. As readers of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks are well aware, Lenin’s admiring remarks on Hegel’s text are numerous, especially when Hegel is focusing on two of the thematic concerns that, I will argue below, fully animate Cai Yi’s Marxist aesthetics: namely, dialectics and the desire to capture the concrete in its universality. It is important to be clear here at the outset that my argument is that Chinese Marxist aesthetics as a whole shared with New Criticism exactly the same concern for capturing the concrete “wealth of the particular.” What Cai Yi in particular shared as well with the New Critics was a commitment to universality, though in a form achieved not by gradually abstracting away all concrete particularity until only the empty, intelligible pure concept was left. Rather,

48 Vladimir Illich Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, “Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic,” in V. I. Lenin: Collected Works (Progress Publishing: Moscow, 1972) 38, 99. The Chinese translation was has been reissued at least once every decade since, including twice during the Cultural Revolution in 1973 and 1974. For a good discussion of the importance of Lenin’s Notebooks for Western Marxism, see Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995). 49 Lenin is commenting on this passage from Hegel’s Science of Logic. “It is only after profounder acquaintance with the other sciences that logic ceases to be for subjective spirit a merely abstract universal and reveals itself as the universal which embraces within itself the wealth of the particular—just as the same proverb, in the mouth of a youth who understands it quite well, does not possess the wide range of meaning which it has in the mind of a man with the experience of a lifetime behind him, for who, the meaning is expressed in all its power” (Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, 58, italics mine).

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what both Cai Yi and John Crowe Ransom sought was akin to what Hegel termed the “concrete universal.” One way to broach the problem of the relationship between the conceptual and the concrete is to pose them in terms of the problem of universality. Above, I noted C. T. Hsia’s performative interpretation of Mao’s rejection of “abstract freedom, abstract truth, abstract human nature” as simply Mao’s way of saying the Party would control the content of all literary works. But what I would like to examine briefly the constative moment of the statement itself, with reference to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. For Hegel, concrete—as opposed to abstract freedom is achieved only by the modern state, as the realization of the identity of the universal and “personal individuality and its particular interests.” The result is that the universal does not prevail or achieve completion except along with particular interests and through the co-operation of particular knowing and willing; and individuals likewise do not live as private persons for their own ends alone, but in the very act of willing these they will the universal in the light of the universal, and their activity is consciously aimed at none but the universal end.50

Of course, for both Cai and Mao, as for Marx, a truly concrete freedom would only be possible in a classless society.51 The point is that only when rendered properly concrete by historical practice does freedom achieve “actuality.” That “actuality” is only possible when, in Hegel’s terms, “personal individuality and its particular interests achieve their complete development.” In a society like that of 20th-twentieth century China suffering from the twin ills of “semi-feudalism and semicolonialism,” no such “complete development” is possible for the vast majority of people. My interest here lies neither in endorsing or attempting in any manner to explain away CCP’s deprivation of the freedom of actual,

50 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 160. 51 In reality, as Sidney Hook noted wryly in his discussion of Marx’s critique of this passage in Hegel, “[Hegel’s bourgeois state] is not even an umpire in the class tugof-war. It is one of the means by which that war is fought. It does not come to bring reconciliation between classes but to reconcile subject classes to their lot” (Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], 22). Hook’s book was originally published in 1936. It is well worth noting in the current context, that Sidney Hook himself played a vital and active role in the purging of Hegel and Marx scholars from philosophy departments in North America during the McCarthy era. See John McCumber, Time in the Ditch, 28.

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historically existing leftist writers by imprisoning or exiling them. Rather, what I am affirming is the necessity of grasping how deeply ingrained was the demand for the universal realization of concrete freedom in Chinese Marxist thought. In other words, the universality that was sought, was a fully concrete one and was furthermore elaborated precisely in opposition to the abstractions of “logical thought” (luoji siwei 逻辑思维). Instead, Cai Yi argues that “image thought” (xingxiang siwei ) as the aesthetic mode of cognition of the real would therefore grant to art not simply the role of privileging in the artwork, above all, the concrete, sensuous particularity of real social existence. One of the central premises of Chinese Marxist aesthetics is thus the constant need to resist abstract formulism in artistic creation. As is well known, this premise was shared by not only such adversaries as Hu Feng and Zhou Yang 周杨. Across the spectrum of leftist writers and critics, the preoccupation with the abstract/concrete relation is also one of the clearest indications in Chinese Marxist aesthetics of Hegel’s influence. My purpose here is to show how pervasive this preoccupation was not only among Cai Yi’s New Critical contemporaries in North America, but as we shall see in the next chapter, the way this very issue links elements of Mao’s Talks to the poet Walt Whitman. In the discussion of Cai Yi’s aesthetics that follows, I will be emphasizing several important elements of what J. M. Bernstein terms “aesthetic modernism,” namely, an “aesthetic critique of enlightened reason and modernity.”52 Bernstein prefaces his discussion of aesthetic modernism with a quote from Nietzsche: “Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance.”53 Bernstein makes clear that we fail to understand the stakes of aesthetic modernism when we construe art and truth in simple opposition. The challenge is rather to think through what truth, morality and beauty (or its primary instance: art) are when what is denied is their categorical separation from one another . . . It is the entwinement of art and truth, the experience of art as somehow cognitive and of truth as sensuous and particular, and not the substitution of one for the other within a stable metaphysical hierarchy, that constitutes the challenge.54

J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 8. 53 Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 1. 54 Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 2. 52

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This “challenge,” undertaken by Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida in Bernstein’s analysis, is precisely the one taken up by Cai Yi on the one hand and his New Critical contemporaries on the other. Each of these critics, if in fundamentally different ways, understands the real content of aesthetic modernism as a critique of so-called “Enlightenment rationality.” Bernstein notes that as a consequence of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, aesthetic judgment itself was sundered from any meaningful relation to truth and morality. The modern post-Kantian drift of aesthetics away from problems of knowledge and especially political praxis was something the modern Chinese aesthetics sought to resist and reverse. The same holds just as true for the New Critical tradition Hsia is working within, though in his case the relation to morality and truth is grounded in an originary conception of religion, more precisely the onto-theological dimension I have noted in Hsia. In a 1955 piece in the Kenyon Review entitled, “Concrete Universal: Observations on the Understanding of Poetry,” Ransom notes the Hegelian origins of the term from which the article’s title is drawn, but in the same stroke re-affirms his allegiance to Kant, declaring that “Kant is closer to modern criticism than Hegel is!”55 Ransom upholds a rigid distinction between what he terms “scientific Universals,” that govern the sphere of theoretical knowledge and “moral Universals” of which poetry and art more generally are a part. What I would like to emphasize here is the way Ransom’s notion of the “moral Universal” links the spheres of the aesthetic to what he terms “moral and theological Universals.” For Ransom, the relationship between the idea and the image is what is decisive. As Jancovich indicates, [Ransom] argues that a fully developed poetry would not just have to include both the image and the idea, but examine them in relation to one another . . . For Ransom, the aesthetic form is not one that privileges the abstract idea or the pre-intellectual perception, but one which involves an interaction and integration of these two elements.56

55 In Ransom’s somewhat glancing but by no means dismissive treatment of Hegel, the latter becomes reduced to the suspect purveyor of philosophy demanding the total, “reformation of nature, as when it takes the form of substituting modern urban life for the old agrarian life” (Ransom, “Concrete Universal: Observations on the Understanding of Poetry,” The Kenyon Review 16, 3 (Autumn 1954): 383–407, 383). What Ransom reacts most strongly against is Hegel’s notion of the “end of art.” 56 Jancovich, Cultural Politics of New Criticism, 40.

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For Jancovich, the crucial point is recognizing that the relationship between the conceptual, universal, and imagistic elements of the work of art entails necessarily a relationship between “ethics and aesthetics.” Indeed, he sees Ransom as insisting not only upon “structural unity” between aesthetics and ethics. Moreover, Ransom understands this unity to be achievable not by individual artists. Rather, such a unity is possible only under social conditions fundamentally different from that provided by modernity, in which knowledge, morality, and art must each function in isolation from one another.57 As Bernstein phrases this problem, “Modernity is the separation of spheres, the becoming autonomous of truth, beauty and goodness from one another, and their developing into self-sufficient forms of practice: modern science and technology, private morality and modern legal forms, and modern art.”58 As Richard K. King has noted, Ransom believed that the “aesthetic qualities of the best poetry—hierarchy, complexity, paradox—should mirror the structure of traditional society as it had existed prior to its dissolution by the acids of modernity.”59 This formulation captures the tendency in the criticism of the Southern Agrarians to see in the art work the image of a now vanished but once comprehensively integrated social order.60 As such, it participates fully in what J. M. Bernstein terms “memorial aesthetics,” namely the legacy of “aesthetic modernism” bequeathed by Kant’s Critique of Judgement.61 In short, Ransom shares with Cai Yi what Bernstein describes

In his essay “Poet Without Laurels,” Ransom writes that the “modern poet [. . .] has disclaimed social responsibility in order to secure this pure aesthetic effect. He cares nothing, professionally, about morals, or God, or native land. He has performed a work of dissociation and purified his art” ( John Crowe Ransom, “Poet without Laurels,” in Literary Criticism in America, ed. Albert D Van Norstrand, [New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957], 274). They have thus “inflicted upon themselves the humility of delaureation, and retiring from public responsibility and honors” (273). 58 Bernstein, Fate of Art, 6. 59 Richard K. King, “Southern Agrarianism,” in A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James T. Kloppenberg (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 646. 60 As King notes, a number of the Southern Agrarians fiercely affirmed the most malignant remnant of that lost social order, namely, racial apartheid. Only Robert Penn Warren, of the original “Twelve Southerners,” abandoned his earlier call for the preservation of segregation (King, “Southern Agrarianism,” 646.) 61 Bernstein writes, “In such a world, our world, judgements of beauty are memorial, in making aesthetic judgements we judge things as ‘as if ’ from the perspective of our lost common sense, a common sense that may never have existed (evidence for it being deriving strictly from the torsion of the analytical articulation of aesthetic experience)” Bernstein, The Fate of Art, 60). 57

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as one of the key features of modern continental philosophy, namely the challenge to “enlightened modernity through recourse to the phenomena of art and aesthetics.”62 If precisely the same kind of relationship can be discerned in Cai Yi’s aesthetics, it has much to do with the fact that for both Ransom and Cai Yi a very similar epistemology is at play. In Cai Yi’s case, for reasons having largely to do with disciplinary and philosophical orientations, the “epistemological process” (renshi de guocheng) is of a specifically and elaborately dialectical materialist nature.63 I will take this up in more detail in the next chapter. But in a much earlier unpublished work, it is not surprising to discover that Ransom had in fact worked out the sketch of an epistemology that he had originally intended to develop more systematically.64 Remarkably for our purposes, what his earlier sketch clearly shared with Cai Yi’s work is a proto-dialectic. Ransom describes the “three moments” that constitute human knowledge. The first moment is described in terms of the “infancy” of consciousness, in which only “pure experience” obtains, void of any “intellectual content.” The second moment (“Youth”) involves the formation of scientific knowledge through the “concepts discovered by cognition.” For Ransom, human beings spend the vast majority of their “waking lives in entertaining and arriving at concepts.” Nonetheless this second order of habitual human experience has a purely practical (one might say “instrumental”) orientation, and that since it functions solely by means of abstractions, it necessarily entails “subtractions from the whole.” Thus the second moment is fraught always with the awareness that the “Whole” which one experiences in the first moment, is absent. The third moment is defined by Ransom as “Maturity—Aesthetic and Reconciliation,” evidencing precisely the recourse to “art and aesthetics” Bernstein describes above.

Bernstein, Fate of Art, 7. As a scholar and critic of literature, if Ransom felt compelled to elaborate his criticism in philosophical form, he felt at some pains to justify that need for his audience. In “The Concrete Universal,” Ransom writes, “But a perhaps small apologia is in order, perhaps it is every overdue,—for bringing philosophy into the literary discussion” (Ransom, “Concrete Universal, 383). 64 John Crowe Ransom, “From a Letter to Allen Tate, September 5, 1926,” in Selected Essays of John Crowe Ransom, ed., with an Introduction by Thomas Daniel Young and John Hindle (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 339–341. The letter in its entirety was published later in John Crowe Ransom, Selected Letters of John Crowe Ransom, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and George Core, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 62 63

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Ransom then poses the problem of how to restore to human experience the “Whole” denied by the abstractions of the second moment. Ransom asks, “How can we get back to the first moment? There is only one answer: By images” (italics mine). The images themselves emerge from the “[i]magination [as] the faculty of Pure Memory, or unconscious mind.” In a passage that we will see shares much with Cai Yi’s dialectical materialist account of “image-thought.” Ransom writes, And therefore, when we make images, we are regressive; we are trying to reconstitute an experience which we once had . . . Only we cannot quite reconstitute them. Association is too strong for us; the habit of cognition is too strong. The images come out much mixed and adulterated with concepts. Experience without concepts is advocated by some systems, and has some healing power, but it is not an adult mode; it cannot really produce images without concepts, but only an imageless and conceptless state, as in the Dionysian state of Nietzsche or the Orientalism of Schopenhauer. What we really get, therefore, by this deliberate recourse to images, is a mixed world composed of both images and concepts; or a sort of practicable reconciliation of the two worlds.65

What is essential here is the manner in which the third moment emerges as the aesthetic in relation to the prior scientific moment. This fundamental difference between the scientific and the aesthetic accords with the distinction between abstract and image thought we noted earlier with Cai Yi. Ransom does not here explicitly define the relation between the second and third moments as an “insurmountable contradiction” as Cai Yi does, but it is clear from the above that it is only “aesthetic activity” that enables the commemoration of an originary, holistic integrity modern society has come to repress—the bleak hallmark of aesthetic modernity.

65 John C. Ransom, Selected Letters, 156. Ransom notes in his letter to Tate that in the book he intends to write and which in the letter is only schematically presented, the ultimate focus will be poetry, which he defines in quasi-Hegelian, dialectical terms: “Poetry is always the exhibit of Opposition and at the same time the Reconciliation between the Conceptual or Formal and the Individual or Concrete. An obvious case of the Formal is meter; which does not seem to impair the life and effectiveness of the Concrete Experience. They coexist” (157).

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Cai Yi, Adorno, and Aesthetic Universality What I would like now to examine is the way the same set of critical concerns are articulated in Cai Yi’s Marxist aesthetic theory. As I noted earlier in this chapter, Cai Yi’s project is premised upon the same conviction that modern capitalist society has fundamentally impoverished not only human experience, but also much more vitally as concerns the political, has radically atrophied the faculty of aesthetic cognition. What Bernstein describes as the “truth-only cognition” of Enlightenment rationality marginalizes and diminishes the essential human powers of aesthetic judgment and artistic creation. For Bernstein, the aporia of aesthetic modernism lies in the fact that as a critique of “truthonly cognition,” it is simultaneously invested in the same philosophical discursivity which “truth-only cognition” claims as its sole possession. Thus, the aesthetic modernist decision to remain in “conceptual fidelity to art,” is always at risk of depriving itself of the discursive capacity to “understand and explain.”66 No doubt, what distinguishes Cai from the aporetic, memorial aesthetic modernism of both Ransom and Bernstein is that for Cai, as a dialectical materialist, the former two critics’ elegiac pessimism was both theoretically and especially practically incompatible to the existential needs of a Chinese Marxist living in Chongqing in 1942. In the face of both the Japanese Imperial army and the KMT’s White Terror, the kind of indeterminacy sometimes characteristic of aesthetic modernism was not a likely premise upon which to build a Marxist aesthetics during a state of constant national emergency. We should keep in mind, as well, that from the perspective of Cai Yi’s philosophical aesthetics, the horrors of both the Japanese Imperial Army and Dai Li’s Juntong secret service represented equally radical exacerbations of capitalist modernity’s pervasive and utter failure to provide for the needs of the human, in its “full, substantial being.” It is essential to understand as well that this represented far less a naïve theoretical optimism than it did a basic Marxist premise that human species-being was an unfinished project to be worked at through historical praxis. Such a view stands in stark rejection of the kind of onto-theological pessimism characteristic of Tate and Hsia, for whom man’s fallen nature formed the absolute limits of his static essence. For Cai,

66

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the deformations imposed by modern, instrumental reason upon human experience inevitably fostered convictions regarding communism as a utopian horizon. Cai’s project thus differs categorically in its essentially practical orientation, guided as it is by the conviction that the recuperative possibilities of aesthetic experience ought not be limited to the form of passive, Kantian aesthetic reflection endorsed by the Southern Agrarian New Critics and indeed, New Criticism, as whole.67 A properly dialectical materialist aesthetics would restore to aesthetic cognition its full participation not only in the sphere of truth, but also that of political praxis. On this count, Cai shares a great deal with his contemporary Adorno, as we will see in what follows. In the very first section of the first chapter, Cai broaches the central problem of his aesthetics, namely “Art and Reality.”68 From the outset, there is no mistaking the fact that the theory of aesthetics that is at stake here is one profoundly invested in the question of how art furnishes knowledge of reality. Art is thus treated according to the type of epistemology we might normally associate with strictly philosophical problems. But Cai argues that the cognitive processes involved in the generation of both scientific and artistic knowledge are largely the same in that both with science and with art, the four stages of “observation, comparison, analysis and synthesis” in the initial formation of representations (biaoxiang 表象) must each occur.69 Further, it is on the basis of the higher level concepts that enable inference and judgment (tuili, panduan 推理判断), that both scientific and image thought take place.70 Cai insists that scientific and artistic knowledge must be understood as sharing a fundamentally equal status. Cai is equally adamant when it comes to criticizing any conception of aesthetics that recoils from granting to artistic knowledge the authority enlightened modernity grants exclusively to science. Art thus offers much more to human understanding than a mere reflection of the fleeting, illusory phenomenal surface of reality. True artistic cognition is capable of lifting the obscuring veil that phenomenality presents itself to human consciousness in the experience of everyday reality.

67 In chapter five I will examine precisely this issue in my reading of Yang Mo’s Song of Youth. 68 Cai Yi, Cai Yi Wen Ji, (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2002) 1: 4. All translations of Cai Yi’s texts are my own. 69 CYWJ 1: 11. 70 CYWJ 1: 13.

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In terms of the knowledge of the truth and essence (zhenli 真理, benzhi) of objective reality, there is no hierarchical difference between artistic and scientific knowledge. Science and art are two equally important means to recognize (renshi) objective reality.71

In the next chapter, I will examine in more detail the nature of the epistemology that makes such artistic knowledge possible. For the time being, I would like to underscore several key points from Cai’s discussion of the differences between scientific and artistic knowledge, since they echo concerns we have just examined in Cai Yi’s close contemporary John Crowe Ransom. To begin with, Cai is careful to distinguish between artistic knowledge and artistic expression (biaoxian 表现), devoting individual chapters to each subject. Cai will likewise reject the conclusion of the Soviet literary theorist Isaak Nushinov, who in his The Essence of Literature, argues that there is no qualitative distinction between scientific and artistic knowledge. For Nushinov, the sole meaningful distinction between the two lies not in terms of actual, particular content of each, but rather in the form each takes in the process of presenting that knowledge.72 Cai rejects as well Nusinov’s conclusion that “science makes use of theoretical concepts in presenting [its content], while art makes use of images.” Artistic knowledge thus cannot be reduced to a mere form of expression. Cai is furthermore critical of Benedetto Croce’s effort to distinguish between scientific knowledge and artistic knowledge on the basis that the former is theoretical (lunli 论理) and acquired through the work of conceptual thought, while the latter emerges from a “direct, intuitive grasp” of reality, without the active use of concepts or reasoning.73 That artistic knowledge shares an equal status with scientific knowledge means also that both must be grasped in terms of the specific ways each is formed. In short, Cai seeks for aesthetics a form of cognition distinct from that of science, though not by purging aesthetic experience of the conceptual and what Adorno termed its “truth-content” (Wahrheitsgehalt).74 Like Cai, Adorno refuses the “insurmountable gulf ” imposed CYWJ 1: 37. CYWJ 1: 38–38 73 CYWJ 1: 37. 74 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, newly translated, edited, and with a translator’s introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Adorno addresses directly the problem of how art must fundamentally connect with philosophy. “For contemporary consciousness, fixated on the tangible and unmediated, the establishment of this relation to art 71 72

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by the modern division between conceptuality and intuition. Bernstein helps clarify what is at stake here in his discussion of Adorno: In each case what is at issue is a questioning of the possibilities for comprehending the relation between universal and particular, where it is agreed from the outset that cognition is a synthesis, there cannot be cognition without conceptuality. Further, Adorno concedes that as things stand the intutitive moment concerns visuality, sensusousness, particularity, immediacy, and contingency; while the conceptual moment refers to meaning, language, mediation, universality and necessity. Because Adorno regards the constitutive components of artistic practice and aesthetic reflection in terms of universal and particular, and further conceives of their relation in terms of synthesis, his operative understanding of the problem of art is everywhere cognitive, a question of reason, rationality, judgment and knowledge.75

Cai’s aesthetics thus shares with Adorno a deep-seated suspicion of modernity’s relegation of aesthetic feeling to the “futile enclaves of sentimentality,”76 cordoned off from any relation to either conceptual knowledge or social praxis. Indeed, what Cai outlines in his epistemology is comparable to what Adorno in Aesthetic Theory terms “aesthetic comportment.” Adorno writes: Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it.77

It is crucial to emphasize here the degree to which Cai Yi’s aesthetics is premised on the same demand to affirm the priority of the object in the epistemological process. In his effort to distinguish between mechanical and dialectical materialisms Cai articulates what Adorno in Negative Dialectics terms the “preponderance of the Object” (Vorrang obviously poses the greatest difficulties, yet without this relation art’s truth content remains inaccessible: Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophical,” 131. 75 Bernstein, Fate of Art, 199, italics mine. 76 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 331. 77 Qtd. in Steven Helmling, “During Auschwitz: Adorno, Hegel, and the ’Unhappy Consciousness‘ of Critique,” Postmodern Culture, 15, 2 ( January 2005): 1, emphasis added.

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des Objekts). Cai writes, “Because objective reality is the only truly existing thing and only materiality is of the first order, (wuzhi cai shi di yici de dongxi 物质才是第一次的东西), consciousness itself is nothing more than a function of materiality developed to the highest stage. This kind of materiality is nerves and brain matter.”78 Liu Kang is fundamentally correct in his description of Cai Yi’s aesthetics as one that tends to essentialize beauty as objective property of nature.79 This issue is closely linked to the problem of typicality in Cai’s aesthetics, as I will show in the next chapter. As we will see, the issue concerns much less the typical in nature than its human social and historical subjective formation. What Deborah Cook argues regarding Adorno on this count applies to Cai Yi as well, namely that, the “preponderance of the material, natural world over reason and consciousness,” reflects a focus upon “the preponderance of the social world, of institutions, agencies, organizations, social-historical practices and procedures, over individuals.”80 As a Marxist, Adorno is first and formost concerned with an account of the complex historical processes, according to which ”the law of capitalist accumulation that has been mystified into a law of Nature.”81 What is important to recognize is that Cai’s materialist epistemology was very clearly intended as a rejection of the metaphysical priority granted to the subject in modern philosophy. In this sense, Cai’s purpose is to counteract the domination of modern instrumental reason by

CYWJ 1: 27. Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, “Due to the inequality inherent in the concept of mediation, the subject enters into the object altogether differently from the way the object enters into the subject. An object can be conceived by a subject but always remains something other than the subject, whereas a subject by its very nature is from the outset an object as well” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [ New York: Continuum Press, 1973], 183). Adorno likewise concurs with Cai Yi’s affirmation of mind or spirit as emerging from nature. “Spirit is not what it enthrones itself as, the Other, the transcendent in its purity, but rather is also a piece of natural history” (Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford [ New York: Columbia University Press, 1998], 156). I was alerted to this quote in Deborah Cook’s article “Adorno’s Critical Materialism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 32, 6 (2006): 719–737, 724. 79 For an excellent discussion of the “subject-object” problem in Adorno in relation to both Zhu Guangqian and Li Zehou, see Liu Kang, Aesthetics and Marxism, 122–133. Liu also discusses Cai Yi’s participation in what the former aptly terms the “aesthetic debate, (1956–1964),” which began twelve years after the initial publication of Cai Yi’s New Theory of Art. 80 Cook, “Adorno’s Critical Materialism,” 725. 81 The quote is originally from Marx, Capital, vol. 1, and is analyzed by Adorno in Negative Dialectics. Cook, “Adorno’s Critical Materialism,” 720. 78

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affirming the subject’s aesthetic engagement and entwinement with the objective materiality of social reality. For Adorno, as well, characteristic of modern instrumental reason in the 20th century is the reduction of heterogeneous, material reality into representations which, in idealist fashion, are deemed “identical” to and exhaustive of some element of social reality. As Cai repeatedly affirms, there exists “no insurmountable gulf ” between subject and object. The materialist orientation of Cai’s aesthetic thus imposes on the subject the continual need to take its cognitive cue from an essentially knowable, but nonetheless fundamentally heterogenous, objective world in which it finds itself. Cai’s epistemology of image thought results in what is ultimately the most important difference between scientific and artistic knowledge. Like Adorno, Cai insists that the cognitive force of the aesthetic is grounded in a specific articulation of the universal and particular. Art’s critical potential lies in the specific way it accomplishes that articulation. For Cai Yi, the distinction between scientific and artstic knowledge can be understood in terms of the relative mix of the intellectual and the perceptual in the formation of each. Cai writes, “In terms of the content of what is known through objective reality, scientific knowledge is primarily the universal encompassing the individual; artistic knowledge is primarily the individual revealing the universal.”82 Artistic knowledge thus combines a greater degree of phenomenal specificity with a nonetheless strong measure of the conceptual universality necessary for it to qualify as knowledge. This is a key element in Cai’s materialist aesthetics, and it aligns him not only with Adorno, but more broadly with a key feature of Hannah Arendt’s thinking about political judgement in the historical wake of totalitarianism. This problem can be best grasped in relation to the distinction Kant draws in the Critique of Judgement between determinant judgments which subsume particulars under universals and reflective judgments in which the particular itself generates the universal.83 What is at stake here is the capacity of the subject to remain sufficiently “entwined” in the object before it to resist the instrumentalizing compulsion to subsume CYWJ 1: 41. Kant writes, “Judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular as being contained in the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then judgment which subsumes the particular under its determinant . . . If, however, the particular is given, to which judgment is to find the universal, then it is merely reflective” (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991], 18). 82 83

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its particularity under a pre-established, given concepts. In his essay on Arendt’s lectures on Kant’s political thought, Ronald Beiner links the aesthetic and the imagination to political judgment: According to Arendt, thought—the critical movement of thinking—loosens the hold of universals (e.g. entrenched moral habits ossified into inflexible general precepts) and thus frees judgment to operate in an open space of moral and aesthetic discrimination and discernment. Judgment functions best when this space has been cleared for it by critical thinking. In this way, the universal does not domineer over the particular; rather, the latter can be apprehended as it truly discloses itself. Thinking itself thereby assumes a political relevance by virtue of its relationship to the faculty of judgment. By loosening the grip of the universal over the particular, thinking releases the political potency of the faculty of judgment—the potency that inheres in its capacity to perceive things as they are, that is, as they are phenomenally manifest.84

In the same way in Kant that reflective judgments are logically prior to and the necessary condition for determinant judgments, with Cai Yi the abstract, analytical workings of consciousness in scientific thought are deeply connected to the concrete particularity of artistic thought.85 Cai argues that both forms of thought utilize concepts. The difference lies primarily in terms of the quality and nature of the concept it utilizes. Scientific thought relies upon concepts in which attributes and 84 Ronald Beiner, “Interpretive Essay,” in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 89–156, 112. What this means in terms of actual political praxis is clear in Michael Denny’s application of Arendt’s Kantian-derived political theory to her book on the trial of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. “Certainly Eichmann was not insane. He could function and apply rules of conduct given him well enough; he was able to exercise what Kant would call determinant judgment, the ability to subsume a particular under a general concept or rule. What he was incapable of was Kant’s reflective judgment. And here Arendt’s seizure of part of Kant’s esthetic philosophy for morality has enormous implications. Eichmann’s problem . . . comes from the fact that he judged according to the rule only too well . . . he never looked at the particular case in front of him and tried to judge it without a rule” (Michael Denneny, “The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill [New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979]), 245–275, 254–255. The passage is quoted in Leora Y. Bilsky, “When Actor and Spectator Meet in the Courtroom,” in Judgment, Imagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant to Arendt, ed. Ronald Beiner and Jennifer Nedelsky (New York: Rowman and Littlefied Publishers, 2001), 257–285, 267. 85 Adorno offers a useful paraphrase for this intermixture of the particular with the conceptual in the art work in relation to the inherent universality of language. “That universal elements are irrevocably part of art at the same time that art opposes them, is to be understood in terms of art’s likeness to language. For language is both hostile to the particular and nevertheless seeks it rescue” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 204).

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specific characteristics are weak or simply absent—they “lack a clear image (xingxiang).”86 Scientific judgments and inferences are all made on the basis of the more abstract concepts. Ultimately, the knowledge that such scientific concepts enable is the subsumption of the individual under the universal.87 Artistic thought, on the other hand, uses concepts that are more “intimately united with [the] representations” out of which they emerge.88 Such an attention to the attributes and shared characteristics produces a more vivid and concrete concept. This more concrete concept of, for example, a flower may be distinguished from the more abstract, scientific concept of a flower by virtue of the fact that it “may even be able to arouse sensation within us.”89 Further, so-called concrete concepts admittedly are formed on the basis of universal, necessary, essential aspects, but it is not completely the case that the concept has no relationship whatsoever to the many individual, contingent phenomenal aspects of the real thing which it reflects. This relation between the concept and the phenomenal [aspects] is precisely its concreteness ( juxiangxing 具象性).90

Thus, the difference between scientific concepts and artistic concepts turns on the nature of the image (xiang 象), which may be either abstract (chou 抽) or concrete ( ju 具). The artistic imagination, Cai writes, utilizes the “concrete aspect of the concept” ( gainian de juxiangxing 概念的 具象性) in its activity. The work of artistic imagination is not merely oriented toward the production of individual artworks, as such, but rather, the generation of knowledge of the world.91 The ultimate cognitive emphasis of Cai’s aesthetics is fully born out in the passage that follows, in which Cai addresses what is the final purpose and end of the work of creative imagination. Cai uses exactly the same language to describe the work of concrete concepts in the artistic process, as he uses to describe the work of abstract concepts in science:

CYWJ 1: 13. CYWJ 1: 13. 88 CYWJ 1: 40. 89 Cai Yi cites the example of Cao Cao 曹操 in Romance of the Three Kingdoms rallying his flagging, thirsting troops. “I pointed off in the distance with my whip and said, ‘There is a grove of plum trees just up ahead.’ Hearing this, the soldiers all began to salivate, slaking their thirst” (‘面有梅林.´军士闻之, 口皆生唾, 由是 不渴). Luo Guanzhong 罗贯中, San guo yan yi 三国演义, ( Jilin: Wenshi chubanshe, 1995, 157). 90 CYWJ 1: 13. 91 CYWJ 1: 14. 86 87

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For this reason, the artistic imagination takes advantage of the concreteness of the image in order to expound the relation between the known and the known, as well as, the relation between the known and the unknown. In other words, [the imagination] makes use of the concrete concept ( juti de gainian 具体的概念) to engage in image thought.92

Thus both artistic and scientific thought take as their end the elucidation of the laws of necessity that govern reality. Further, both activities provide not only the basis for discovering the laws of necessity that govern the relation between things known, but also enable one to bring the unknown into the sphere of the practical knowledge of the real. Just as there are two types of concepts (abstract and concrete) and two forms of thought (scientific and artistic) the two relations between two known things, and between known and unknown things, one form of thought will be most appropriate for the elucidation of one relation. Cai’s “concrete concept” generated by artistic thought thus seeks to ensure for aesthetic knowledge the openness to the world which alone enables the possibility of a true encounter with what exceeds the positivity of any given social and political reality. Artistic knowledge, as we have seen, is not simply purely conceptual knowledge dressed up to appeal to our senses. It emerges from the unique instance of the artist’s dialectical encounter with material, objective reality. Such an encounter differs categorically from the imposition of what Arendt terms “self-fulfilling idea” upon that same objective reality, subsuming the unique particularity of that reality under pre-ordained universal concepts.93 Cai’s aesthetics is thus designed to answer the question of CYWJ 1: 14. As we will see in the following chapter, Arendt defines ideology in totalitarianism as follows: “An ideology is quite literally what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. Its subject matter is history, to which the ‘idea’ is applied; the result of this application is not a body of statements about something that is, but the unfolding of a process which is in constant change. The ideology treats the course of events as though it followed the same ‘law’ as the logical exposition of its ‘idea.’ Ideologies pretend to know the mysteries of the whole historical process-the secrets of the past, the intricacies of the present, the uncertainties of the future-because of the logic inherent in their respective ideas” (Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966], 469). For a discussion of Arendt’s views on totalitarianism, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Nazi Myth”, Critical Inquiry 16, 2 (1990): 291–312, 295. It is certainly a measure of the complexity of the problem of totalitarianism that it would be both Lenin and Mao, for Slavoj Zizek, who at certain specific points in their political careers succeeded most of all in grasping fundamentally that “there is no objective logic of the ‘necessary stages of development.” For only with that realization were the Bolshevik and Chinese revolutions possible as radical “deviations” from the clear historical course projected by Marx (Slavoj Zizek, Did Someone 92 93

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how the unique, particularity of the individual artwork can claim to present to the store of practical human knowledge something approximating the truth-claims of science. In this case, one of the fundamental issues that will later emerge is precisely which form of thought enables one to think beyond the immediate given nature of social reality. Is there not one form of thought that better provides for an unveiling of the unknown, bringing it into a relation with the known? Artistic thought differs from scientific thought in that “the content of artistic knowledge is the individual making manifest the universal.”94 Artistic thought enables one to discover the universal law under which the individual unknown thing is to be subsumed. Artistic thought thus makes possible a radical separation with the given. In Cai Yi’s aesthetics, artistic knowledge is what enables what we will examine in my conclusion as the figuration of universality in Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s novel Hongyan. What is finally of interest to me here is the way in which Cai Yi’s aesthetics affirms the priority of the individual (gebie 个别) in relationship to the universal. Precisely here, we can see why Cai’s aesthetics shares with Adorno a concern for the priority of the object. Just as importantly, however, is the fact that as the example of Cai Yi’s aesthetics makes clear, socialist realism was not premised theoretically upon naïve demand that an existing principle (or policy) be rendered aesthetically or literarily accessible to a mass readership, as his critique of Nusinov makes clear. Exactly the opposite is the case, for the actual process of socialist literary production clearly occurs authentically for Cai Yi only so long as the artist/writer preserves an open-ended engagement with an objective materiality whose essence can never be known in advance. The privilege Cai demands for artistic knowledge—over and against the instrumentalist, concept-driven process of scientific knowledge thus stands in stark contrast to any conception of Chinese Marxist aesthetic theory as simply another 20th-century totalitarian instance of modern Enlightenment run amok. Of course, my point is not to claim that in actual practice, Chinese socialist realist novels fully measured up to the demands of Cai Yi’s aesthetic theory, especially as regards the artist’s responsibility to the Say Totalitarianism: Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion [New York: Verso, 2001] 115). See also Slavoj Zizek, “Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule,” On Practice and Contradiction, (New York: Verso, 2007), 1–25. 94 CYWJ 1: 41.

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objective reality whose essence they come to grasp via the process of artistic knowledge. But I will argue that the fundamental approach towards objective materiality that Cai Yi’s aesthetic articulates is vital for us to recognize. For artistic knowledge as a process—and one that can place the most extreme demands upon the subject—is one that is modeled repeatedly in Chinese socialist realist novels in the form of the individual revolutionary’s formation (Bildung). As I will attempt to further underscore in my two final chapters, my analysis of Cai Yi should suggest the need to approach Chinese socialist realism as the product of a far more complex relationship between literature and aesthetics. By doing so, we may be better able to account for how Chinese socialist fiction realizes in a particular fashion the modern concept of literature, as I am examining it here. My larger concern is to show that Cai Yi can likewise help us understand modern China’s own inscription within what I noted Nicholas Brown has termed the global eidaesthetic itinerary of modern literature. For as we shall see in the next chapter, the concept of the literary and aesthetic concept of the type (dianxing) is one that emerges in the 19th century and by the mid-20th century comes to span the globe very much in the wake of capital’s worldwide flows.

CHAPTER FOUR

GLOBAL/MODERN FIGURATIONS OF THE TYPE IN CAI YI, HEIDEGGER, AND WHITMAN In the introduction I argued that as the modern concept of literature takes form in China, theory and criticism begin to play increasingly important roles. I have also argued that precisely because both literary theory/criticism and philosophy are so vital to this concept of literature, aesthetics itself becomes the focal point of theoretical inquiry. My desire has been to underscore the continuities between Lu Xun’s “The True Story of Ah Q” and what would emerge in the post-liberation era as the socialist realist novel, such as the two classics of that genre that I examine in chapters five and six. The early introduction of the discourse of aesthetics was essential to linking up literature, modern philosophy and criticism in the precise way that the institution of modern literature required. But what especially “The True Story of Ah Q” reveals is the fashioning of a modern literary type, notably as the product of a concern for Chinese national character. While the concepts of the type and the problem of typification have been frequently noted in discussions of modern Chinese literature, the concepts themselves have remained relatively obscure, at least in Western studies. In China, however, the concept was given rigorous elaboration in the work of Cai Yi as early as 1942. One of the premises I adopted in my introduction was that when such figures as Lu Xun sought to negotiate a relationship to Smith’s doctrine of the Chinese national character, they did not simply shear off Smith’s theological solution for China and work only at the remaining laundry list of Chinese moral failings. As I noted earlier, it went very much without saying that such avid readers of Nietzsche as Mao Dun and especially Lu Xun inevitably felt no compunction to follow Smith’s theological prescription of Christian civilization for China’s weaknesses. On the contrary, what Smith took to be the Chinese soul’s requirement of a faith in a Christian God was transformed into an onto-typological investment in the human, as such, whose essence would require figuration in the form of the type. Smith’s book on national character opened up the problem of the human soul and in its place

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in China, a (post-)metaphysical Marxist discourse of human essence (Gattungswesen des Menschen) emerged to fill in that discursive space.1 Of course, this did not happen immediately. But it is remarkable just how precisely Lu Xun’s creation of China’s first literary type fits within the much broader modern trajectory of image’s (xingxiang , Bild) relation to the soul was to the emerging Marxist conception of human essence.2 The concept of the type (dianxing) is crucial in this process because, as Lacoue-Labarthe has shown in his analysis of Heidegger, it marks the site of a “rescendent” inversion of onto-theology into onto-typology. In other words, the formerly metaphysical principle of transcendence is inverted and “turns around into” a rescendence in the modern (post-)metaphysical figure of human essence.3 One of my primary tasks in this chapter, however, is to show how this concept of the type and its relationship to literature and aesthetics becomes globalized to such a remarkable degree. Lu Xun’s Ah Q simply marks China’s earliest inscription within the global eidaesthetic modernity that the concept of the type contributes to inaugurating. As we will see below, Cai Yi’s elaboration of a theory of the type represents the effort in China to provide this concept with a rigorous philosophical grounding. It is clear from the course of Chinese socialist literature and art, that the aesthetic concept of the type was not only never meant to serve a high literary modernism, but also the concept’s circulation within Chinese Marxist literary discourse served to highlight literary modernism’s ultimate failures. Chinese socialist literature’s 1 It is worthwhile recalling here that the concept of human species-being is derived in the early Marx from Feuerbach’s the Essence of Christianity (1841), though the term was first used by Hegel. For a lucid discussion of the concept, see Allen Wood, Karl Marx (New York: Routledge, 2004), 16–31, 17. 2 In his discussion of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Schiller writes, “In him dwells a pure and moral image of mankind.” He writes further, “[E]very individual man . . . carries in himself, by predisposition and determination, a pure ideal Man, with whose unchanging oneness it is the great task of his being, in all its changes, to correspond” (Qtd. in Redfield, Phantom Formations, 50).This principle is fundamental to the socialist realist Bildungsroman, as I show in the next chapter. 3 Heidegger wants to explain “how the meta-physical of metaphysics, transcendence, changes, when, within the confines of the differentiation, the Gestalt of the essence of man appears as the source of the giving-of-meaning. Transcendence, understood in the manifold sense, turns back into the corresponding re-scendence and disappears in it. A retreat of this kind through Gestalt takes in such a way that its state of being present is represented and is present again in the imprint of its stamping. The state of being of the Gestalt of the worker is power” (Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde [New York: Twayne] 1958), 57. For a discussion of this passage see, Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 55.

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aspirations were, therefore, clearly “popular” by both theoretical and political default.4 We should recall as well that as such, Chinese socialist literature never merely falls short of C.T. Hsia’s modernism, it quite consciously, even defiantly, charted a wholly different course for itself. Precisely because of its popular orientation and the need to reach a mass readership, a “democratic” literature based upon a philosophical theory of the type in China in the early 1940s should be understood as taking up elements of the literature/theory relation already installed in multiple sites around the globe beginning in the 19th-century.5 In this sense, it seems possible to speak of a literary form of a vernacular modernism akin to the sort Miriam Hansen has elaborated in film studies. This specifically literary vernacular modernism differs from cinema by virtue of the fact that it predates its cinematic form by nearly a century.6 But just like Hansen’s filmic vernacular modernism the literary form is no less global.

4 I preserve the term popular here because of its connections to the Russian term naródnost. For a discussion of this term’s importance to the doctrine of socialist realism, see C. Vaughn James, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). As one of the basic principles of Soviet socialist realist aesthetics, naródnost, “literally people-ness,” (1) is meant to capture the degree to which an artistic work embodies the “highest level of social awareness attained in a given epoch . . . and man’s most humane aspirations in his struggle for a more dignified mode of existence” (3). Crucial for our purposes is the fact that works with the highest degree of “naródnost” become exemplary of universal humanity. “By virtue of its ‘popular” [naródny] aspect, the art of one people may become part of the heritage of others, who therefore become aware of the universal significance of the most advanced ideals for the whole of mankind” (3). 5 Those sites include in this chapter the post-Civil War United States and Germany during the Second World War. But in terms of understanding what was to take place in China from the early 1940s on, 19th-century Russia is of decisive importance. Limitations of space prevent a fuller examination of this problem, but it should be noted that much of the post-liberation work on translations from Russian was done with the specific goal in mind of gaining a deeper understanding of “image thought,” especially as formulated initially by Vissarion Belinsky in the 1840s. 6 Miriam Hansen writes, “I am referring to this kind of modernism as “vernacular” (and avoiding the ideologically overdetermined term “popular”) because the term vernacular combines the dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, with connotations of discourse, idiom, and dialect, with circulation, promiscuity, and translatability.” Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity 6,2 (1999): 59–77, 68, emphasis added. Hansen’s rejection of David Bordwell’s cognitivist approach to Hollywood cinema’s global reception is equally important: “But I do think that, whether we like it or not, American movies of the classical period offered something like the first global vernacular. If this vernacular had a transnational and translatable resonance, it was not just because of its optimal mobilization of biologically hardwired structures and universal narrative templates but, more important, because it played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on

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As I noted in the introduction, the modern concept of literature emerges in the late 18th century in the wake of capitalism. It is capital’s increasingly rapid globalization of itself that facilitates the geopolitical itinerary of what Brown terms the “peculiar philosophico-artistic or eidaesthetic hybrid” that is the modern concept of literature.7 In the case of China, we must be sensitive to the fact that while figures such as Wang Guowei engage modern aesthetics via Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, it is the vast translation projects launched by Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, Mao Dun, Zheng Zhenduo, and countless others working with especially Eastern European and Russian literatures and literary criticism that would contribute comprehensively to China’s alignment with this literary modernity. In this context, it is hardly surprising that Lu Xun would be responsible for not only the creation of China’s first literary type, but also that he would likewise introduce the concept of the type into Chinese criticism through one of his countless translation projects—in this case, Artsybashev. By the same token, one of the most striking features of this globalized literary vernacular modernism is the way the theory of the eidaesthetic type comes to be addressed with particular philosophical rigor at a fateful historical juncture in the 20th century in both China and Germany. What is essential here is awareness that this vernacular modernist literature is hybrid in nature, combining elements from the “sober precincts” of high, modern philosophy with the seemingly more low-brow literary form of the Bildungsroman.8 Not surprisingly, both the Bildungsroman in general as a modern literary form, and specifically the Chinese socialist realist transformation of the same remains perennially subject to the accusation that it is not fully literary, perhaps most especially according to Hsia’s New Critical criteria of artistic evaluation. This is precisely why we will never get closer to grasping what is so

modernity and modernization, because it articulated, multiplied, and globalized a particular historical experience” (Hansen, “Mass Production,” 68, emphasis added). 7 Brown, Utopian Generations, 14. 8 Marc Redfield notes the much deeper connections that tie modern philosophical discourse not only to the Bildungsroman, but even more vitally to the study of literature in the modern university: “Thus from the sober precints of philosophy one is led with disconcerting speed to the large reaches of ideology; indeed, ideology becomes the limit-term difficult to control. For this aesthetic logic of exemplarity subtends powerful Western ideas and discourses of the self, the nation, race, historical process, the literary canon, and the function of criticism; it forms the role of the humanities in the modern university” (Redfield, Phantom Formations, ix). As I have been arguing, much of this holds true for 20th-century China, though in quite unique ways.

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powerfully and broadly at work in the project of 20th-century Chinese literature, including socialist realist novels, if we fail to broaden the scope of inquiry beyond the narrow prerogatives of New Criticism, to include what I am terming here literary vernacular modernist text, par excellence, the Chinese socialist realist Bildungsroman. Redfield addresses this problem as follows: The case of the Bildungsroman confirms the generalization [that] “high” and “popular” culture are two sides of a single coin, and an absolute aesthetic performance must be both at once. This double imperative accounts for the hint of crassness and vulgarity haunting the idea of the Bildungsroman; precisely because it is an aesthetic genre—the genre of the aesthetic—it will need to be a degradable form and address itself to what an acculturated class understands as the masses.9

What this should suggest is that in treating the modern institution of Chinese literature as participating fully in the modern concept of literature, we must set our sights further afield in an effort to account for the Chinese socialist realist novel’s liminal status between the high literary modernist culture that was the highly exclusive purview of Hsia’s History and the more popular (narodny) socialist realist novel. In the case of a Chinese literary investment in the type that begins with Lu Xun, looking elsewhere means only coming to grips with the specifically philosophical aesthetic discourse that subtends the concept of the type. Thus, as I noted in my introduction, it is the very 20th-century modernity of the texts I examine that I wish to emphasize, precisely because they partake of the same globalized field of eidaesthetics. In what immediately follows then, I will show the global extent of this modern eidaesthetic concept of the type as it is arrayed in three texts, from Heidegger, Cai Yi and Walt Whitman.

9 Redfield, Phantom Formations, 53. Importantly, for our purposes, Redfield continues: “In fascist or totalitarian Marxist narratives, the masses will become the protagonist of such a novel; the translation of the Subject into the fantastic immediacies of blood and race is a logical (though by no means necessary) exacerbation of aesthetic ideology.” Redfield’s examples include Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education. He treats no examples of either “fascist or Marxist totalitarian” narratives. As I have underscored in the previous chapter, the problem of totalitarianism is a good deal more complex in both Chinese aesthetic theory, and in socialist realist novels.

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chapter four The Heideggerian Type, Alfred Rosenberg’s “Race Form,” and (para-)Humanity

In a series of lectures on Nietzsche delivered in 1940, Heidegger enumerates the varieties of “consciously posited bindings” that in the modern age secure for “mankind” the possibility of its “absolute dominion over the entire earth.” These “bindings” (das Verbindliche, or the obligatory) include, among others, “human reason” (“Enlightenment”), the “factual” (“Positivism”), and the “beautiful figure” (“Classicism”). Heidegger speaks also of the “binding” that is the “power of self-reliant nations”, or the ‘‘proletariat of all lands,’’ or “individual peoples and races,” alluding in the latter formulations to the ideological forces unleashed in a Europe rapidly plunging deeper into a global war, whether Nazism, fascism, or Bolshevism.10 Heidegger concludes his catalogue of bindings with the one which most preoccupied him in his reading of Nietzsche and to which in the 1950s he would devote even more elaborate analyses, namely the concept of the “type”: Finally, [the binding] can be the creation of a mankind that finds the shape of its essence neither in “individuality” nor in the “mass”, but in the “type” [Typus]. The type unites in itself in a transformed way the uniqueness that was previously claimed for individuality and the similarity and universality that the community demands.11

The following discussion proposes a network of philosophical and ideological connections that make intelligible the logic that Heidegger, for one, exercised when he put into relation “mankind,” “absolute dominion over the earth,” and the notion of “the type.” In Typography, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe presents a detailed discussion of Heidegger’s extensive Nietzsche analyses, showing how the figure of Zarathustra captures for the first time what Heidegger understands as the figuration of a new type of humanity. As modern metaphysics comes to a close in Nietzsche, the “type” is determined as the power of the human, as subjectivity, to form itself through its own “bestowal of meaning.” Attached to this metaphysical determination of the “type” is everything suggested by the notions of impression, seal, imprint, figuration,

Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Vol. 4, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), 99. 11 Heidegger, Nietzsche, 4: 99. 10

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formation, and others in a string of related terms. When, in 1955, Heidegger addresses Ernst Jünger’s 1932 work, The Worker: Domination and Form (Der Arbeiter: Herrschaft und Gestalt), he links Jünger’s notion of the “type” directly to Nietzsche: In another respect, the metaphysical conception of the Worker is, however, differentiated from the Platonic and even from the modern, except that of Nietzsche. The source of giving of meaning, the power which is present from the outset and thus stamping everything is Gestalt [form] as the Gestalt of a humanity . . . Not the I-ness [Ichheit] of an individual person, the subjectiveness of the egoity, but the preformed formlike presence of a species of men (type) forms the most extreme subjectivity which comes forth in the fulfillment of modern metaphysics and is presented by its thinking.12

Heidegger traces Jünger’s worker as ‘type’ to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. As I argued in chapter two, what is decisive about Zarathustra is that he is not simply the poetic product of Nietzsche’s purely literary imagination: not strictly a literary figure, Zarathustra partakes fully of the philosophical character of Nietzsche’s other works. In Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading, Zarathustra is, for Heidegger, a Gestalt that emerges from the “poetizing essence of Reason”.13 Within our accustomed antipodal discursive logic of East and West, nothing would seem further removed from Heidegger’s wartime reflections on the modern “metaphysical figure of man” than the theoretical work of Chinese Marxist Cai Yi, labouring in China at the very same moment in history to produce a modern theory of philosophical aesthetics.14 Besieged politically by the Chinese Nationalist government’s violently repressive “White Terror” campaigns against their ideological foes, as well as by Germany’s Axis ally Japan, then occupying much of eastern China,15 Cai Yi developed an analysis of aesthetic production

Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans. and intro. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1958), 54–55. 13 Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 60. 14 Like many other progressive Chinese intellectuals of his generation, Cai Yi was exposed to Marxism in Japan. His exposure to aesthetic theory, during his studies in Japan from 1929 to 1937, was more unusual. His first full-length study of aesthetic theory, “New Theory of Art,” was published in 1942, before he joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1945. After liberation in 1949, Cai Yi’s theoretical writings were devoted primarily to applying Marxist aesthetic theory to the study of literature as well as to philosophical debates concerning materialist aesthetics. 15 The Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy, and Japan was signed in September of 1940 in Berlin. 12

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oriented explicitly toward the ends of revolution. Needless to say, the distance that separates the ideological climates of Cai Yi’s Marxist intellectual orientation from Heidegger’s wartime affiliations with German National Socialism is enormous.16 If we can be certain of anything, it is that nothing approximating “direct influence”, however loosely conceived, could ever explain the fact that Cai Yi would, on his own account, undertake a philosophical elaboration of the very same concept of the “type” (dianxing) as would preoccupy Heidegger in his dealing with the Typus, albeit inflected through the philosophical and political rhetoric of dialectical materialism. When Cai Yi writes in his New Theory of Art (Xin yishulun) that the “type” is the “manifestation of the universal in the individual,” he is acutely aware of the universality demanded by what was, for him, the socialist community in formation, much as Heidegger points to “the Gestalt of a humanity” that is “stamping everything.” In what follows, I take it that we are least able to account for the full measure of postcolonial complexity that marks this wartime philosophical-cum-aesthetic interest in the “type,” when it occurs in such radically distinct cultural and ideological spaces as those within which Heidegger and Cai Yi respectively worked, by drawing attention to the shared features of communism and fascism as totalitarianisms. Doing so would obscure the more distant, yet nonetheless fundamental historical dimensions of the problem that I explore below. Even worse, it would prevent the possibility of recognizing in the “type,” as LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy so acutely do, the modern metaphysical determination of the political as the means to realize “not a type of man, but the type of humanity—. . . an absolutely typical humanity.”17 Were we to resort, instead, to some rubric of theoretical influence, it would offer no more purchase upon the intriguing fact that the notion of the type was to be fully installed in Chinese socialist realist aesthetic theory during the 1950s, after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, at the very time Heidegger was beginning his own postwar philosophical analyses of the type via a renewed critical focus

16 Heidegger joined the Nazi party in 1932, while Cai Yi joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1945. For a detailed, sober, and at times devastating examination of Heidegger’s relationship to National Socialism, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 17 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, ed. Simon Sparks (Routledge: London, 1997), 151.

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upon both Nietzsche’s and Jünger’s articulations of the same. The intellectual milieu that had established itself in the early years of Chinese socialist construction was, perforce, officially antagonistic to any German intellectual resource deemed to be compromised by German fascism. Moreover, a leftist intelligentsia that had weathered over two decades of Nationalist repression, both political and intellectual, would not have provided a receptive and sympathetic audience to Heidegger, even less so to Jünger. Setting aside, therefore, explanations based in either totalitarian commonalities or direct theoretical influence, the links between Heidegger and Cai Yi must be accounted for in a manner that, for one thing, addresses the postcolonial problem of China’s (self)inscription within the broader project of modern (post-)metaphysical thought and, for another, attends to what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy identify as the eidaesthetic program of literature that this thought engenders. Following Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s lead, I have used the term eidaesthetics as a general rubric under which to indicate the complex articulation between literature and philosophy that defines modern post-Kantian philosophical aesthetics including not only that of Chinese Marxist, Cai Yi, but also the literary speculations of Walt Whitman, some seventy years earlier, in the United States. Chinese philosophical aesthetics must be seen as the direct consequence not simply of the adoption of modern Western theoretical systems of knowledge. What China appropriates from the West in response to the longue durée of Europe’s globalization of itself, a process that impinges upon China with immediate violence during the Opium Wars of the 1840s, is not simply the technical know-how of ship production, industrial engineering, urban planning, the modern forms of social control, including prisons, schools, and so forth. Rather, I will argue here that what marks the postcolonial moment in China is the appropriation of the very aspiration to realize the completion of metaphysics by means of the figure of the human.18 In other words, the vital element of Chinese Marxism that I will examine below, namely Cai Yi’s Marxist philosophical aesthetics, is founded upon a dialectical materialist critique of metaphysics (and, as such, all “idealisms”), and functions by means of the privilege it grants to the image or figure (xingxiang) and the type (dianxing). In Cai’s Marxist usage, the “figure”

18 Simon Sparks, “Editor’s Introduction: Politica Ficta,” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, xiv–xxviii, xxii.

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makes manifest the universal in a manner akin to the Jena romantics’ post-Kantian concern for the sensible presentation that would figure and give form to the Idea.19 This is also to say that if China, via its own appropriation of Marxism, partakes fully in what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy think of as the figurative “essence” of the political, it is a necessary consequence of China’s status as a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” society.20 Even before China’s iconoclastic intellectuals of the late 19th and early-20th centuries undertook the task of coming to grips with the essential post-Enlightenment parameters of Western philosophical and political thought initially, primarily through Kant, the philosophemes of the figure/image had long since begun to exert their formative power in shaping the West’s own vision/imagination of its others. China, as the Oriental “moment” in Hegel’s world history, has a prominent place in the ethnography of non-European cultures that, for different reasons, remain at a decisive remove from what properly enables the emergence of the fully human. It goes without saying that there was any number of different representations of the West’s others, from the condescending to the vilifying, but my purpose is not to assemble an inventory of such representations of China. On the contrary, I want to show how the 19th-century European prehistory of China’s affirmative embrace of the type, in the 1930s and 1940s, took particular form in Hegel’s signature diagnosis of the Orient’s misalignment with the project of a fully human history.21 What is crucial for our purposes is precisely how this diagnosis is linked to the problem of the

19 See Barnard and Lester, “Translators’ Introduction,” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, vii–xx, viii–ix. 20 Writing also in 1940, Mao Zedong described contemporary China as follows: “Since the invasion of foreign capitalism and the gradual growth of capitalist elements in Chinese society, the country has changed by degrees into a colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal society. China today is colonial in the Japanese-occupied areas and basically semi-colonial in the Kuomintang areas, and it is predominantly feudal or semi-feudal in both. Such, then, is the character of present-day Chinese society and the state of affairs in our country. The politics and the economy of this society are predominantly colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal, and the predominant culture, reflecting the politics and economy, is also colonial, semi-colonial and semi-feudal” (Mao Zedong, “On New Democracy,” quoted in Timothy Cheek, Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions: A Brief History with Documents [New York: Palgrave, 2002], 80). 21 It is vital here again to note Lydia Liu’s insistence that we remain attentive to the larger discursive milieu out of which such theoretically “immature” figures like Arthur K. Smith emerge and which makes the very discourse of “national character” possible in the first instance (Liu, Translingual Practice, 53).

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aesthetic image (Bild), imagination (Einbildungskraft) and, finally, proper human formation (Bildung), all elements essential to the 20th-century’s philosophical/political investment in the figure. I will also show that the mid-20th-century philosophical aesthetics of the Chinese Marxist theorist Cai Yi line up in striking ways with the American nationalist aesthetics of Walt Whitman. A comparison between the two will help to indicate the extraordinary scope and resilience of what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy term the modern metaphysical determination of the political as the “discourse of the re-appropriation of man in his humanity, the discourse of the actualization of the genre of the human.”22 Hegel’s vision of the Orient as a site of desolation, on the one hand, and what I will term the para-human in crude Yellow Peril literature, on the other, both draw negatively upon the same eidaesthetic resources which govern the concept of the type, itself tightly bound up with “the human” and contraries to “the human.”23 To begin, then, precisely with that against which the human is defined, it will be helpful to link up the problem of the para-human to what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy term the “anti-type.” As both have shown in their analyses of the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s

22 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Political, 111. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy draw here upon the language derived from the early Marx. For example, “Communism as the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being” (The Marx Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker [ New York: Norton Company, 1978], 84. What Marx termed “species-being of man” (Gattungswesen des Menschen) translates into French as “l’être générique de l’homme.” Earlier, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes, “Man is a species being, not only because in practice and in theory he adopts the species as his object . . . but also . . . because he treats himself as the actual, living species; because he treats himself as a universal and therefore free being” (The Marx Engels Reader, 75). To “actualize the genre of the human” would be to realize this universality as freedom. For a feminist critique of “e genre humain,” see Luce Irigaray’s “The Necessity of Sexuate Rights”: “Genre is confused with species. Genre becomes the human race [le genre humain], human nature, etc., as defined with patriarchal culture” (qtd. in Stephen David Ross, The Gift of Touch: Embodying the Good [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998], 268, italics in original. For a critique of the same concept from the perspective of race, see Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in A Companion to African-American Studies, ed. Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 107–118. 23 For a more detailed examination of Hegel in relation to the Yellow Peril literature of Robert Chambers, see my “Para-humanity, Yellow Peril, and the postcolonial (arche-)type,” Postcolonial Studies, 4,4 (December 2006), 421–448.

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The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the notion of “race soul” relies heavily upon the concept of the type: In this respect, it’s essential to point out that [Rosenberg’s] Jew is not simply a bad race, a defective type: he is the anti-type, the bastard par excellence. . . . The Jew has no Seelengestalt [soul form] and therefore no Rassengestalt [race form]. [Rosenberg’s] Jew is not the “antipode” of the German, but his “‘contradiction,’” by which he no doubt very clumsily means to say that the Jew is not an opposite type, but the very absence of type, a danger present in all bastardizations, which are all parasitic.24

This distinction between the Jew as “bad race” and the Jew as “antitype” or “absence of type” is vital in highlighting what Lacoue-Labarthe analyzes carefully and at length in Typography as onto-typology, and we should pause over this term. Lacoue-Labarthe examines ontotypology and the notion of the type (Typus) that informs it in relation to his study of Heidegger’s reading of Jünger’s The Worker: Domination and Form, as we began to see, above. At its most abstract, onto-typology can be understood as the logic of the Being of the subject which grants meaning through forming itself into a figure. Under the head of onto-typology, Lacoue-Labarthe analyses the problem of the formation (Bildung, Platonic paideia [education]) of the subject. He notes that it is Plato who “‘prefigures’ onto-typo-logy, in as much as paideia must be referred to Bildung.”25 24 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Nazi Myth,” Critical Inquiry 16,2 (1990): 291–312, 307. It is vital here to recall that what Rosenberg’s invocation of an absent “soul form” in the Jew rearticulates, if in a different discursive register, Arthur K. Smith’s conception of the “soul” absent in the Chinese. As I have noted throughout this work, the onto-theology and onto-typology are the direct 20th-century philosophical (and political) responses to such diagnoses. My purpose in the chapter, and indeed this book as a whole, is to underscore the full extent to which each is globalized alongside the modern concept of literature. 25 Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 75. Lacoue-Labarthe works through Heidegger’s thinking thus: “For the figure, as the bestowal of meaning—in order to be the bestowal of meaning—must be the figure of a humanity. To man as figure belongs the role of giving meaning—to man, that is, as worker. Which amounts to saying that ontotypology in Jünger still presupposes, at the foundation of being in its totality, a humanity already determined as subjectum: “the preformed figural presence [die vorgeformte gestalthafte Präsenz] of a type of man [Menschenschlag] (typus) forms [bildet] the most extreme subjectivity which comes forth in the fulfillment of modern metaphysics and is (re)presented [dargestellt] by its thinking” (Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 55). The quotes in this passage are from Heidegger’s “Letter to Ernst Jünger: Concerning ‘The Line,’” in The Question of Being, trans. and intro. by William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New York: Twayne, 1958). For a sustained discussion of onto-typology, see also John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 141–142.

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In the light of the Heideggerian captation of type (of man) as “the most extreme subjectivity”, the man-figure fit to bestow meaning, the active lack of form written into Rosenberg’s description of the Jew acquires its full significance: In fact, [the Jew’s] destructiveness is that “active denial of the world” of which Schmitz speaks, the “concern” at the fact that “nothing takes shape.” The Jew—the Pharisee, the parasite—himself possesses no talent for indigenous growth, no organic shape of the soul and therefore no racial shape.26

Nothing more clearly distinguishes Rosenberg’s logic from the equally virulent anti-semitic caricatures of the period than this claim that the Jews have no ”racial shape”. To lack such a shape is the consequence of the “absence of type”. Thus, I use the term para-human to indicate something at a decisive remove from and not less than the genre of the human. That said, the logic of the para-human as the absence of a type by no means excludes the simultaneous and massive proliferation of stereotyped racial images and figures. The anti-type is always already figured, especially in the form of the racist stereotype or caricature. In other words, a race must (dis)embody a lack of type as an essential condition for the pervasive production, circulation, and consumption of a discourse of racial stereotypes. There is a great deal more at work in the discourse of the Yellow Peril than simply the problem of referentiality, that is, laying bare the ideologically inspired mismatch between 19th-century images of the Orient, or China in particular, and what was really there.27 More importantly, as I have shown elsewhere, we must be attentive to what Yellow Peril discourse attempts to (dis)figure, onto-typologically. Very much akin to Rosenberg’s anti-type, and prefiguring it in ways I will elucidate below, one finds in the Yellow Peril fiction of the United States the figure of the para-human serving to signify that which remains at a decisive and permanent remove from the West’s vision of itself as

26 Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the SpiritualIntellectual Confrontations of Our Age, trans. Vivian Bird (1934; repr., Torrence CA: The Noontide Press, 1982). 27 For a comprehensive discussion of Yellow Peril literature, see William F. Wu, The Yellow Peril: Chinese-Americans in American Fiction, 1850–1940 (Hamden CT: Archon Books, 1982).

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the site within which the true essence of the human finds realization.28 What is perhaps most striking about this frightening figure is that it not only finds copious expression in the pulp literature of Yellow Peril fiction, but it is likewise subject to a rigorous philosophical determination in elements of Hegelian discourse. My purpose is to draw on a variety of disparate sources to take an inventory of the extraordinary reach of this figure and its twentieth-century postcolonial consequences. The West’s globalization of itself was to bring in its wake not only a discourse of humanism, but, just as crucially, an acute and threatening sense of what the failure to realize that humanism might hold for the West itself, especially when that failure occurs in some non-Western quarters of the modern globe. Since the problem is not purely one of a racist biologism, the term subhuman would fail to express the modern, quasi-metaphysical character of Yellow Peril discourse since the 19th-century. Rather, as I will make clear in what follows, the metaphysical/theological stakes involved in this image of the para-human as “anti-type” are such that its (non-)relation to Reason and universality exceed the notion of biological organism. Asia, to limit ourselves to this case, will thus be governed by two competing moments in the West’s (metaphysical and pulp fictional) imagination of it. One of these moments will seek the means to render Asia assimilable within the confines of the modern narrative/adventure of Man. This act of assimilation is marked by an internalization of the logic of universality in China. As I will show below, the discourse of modern Chinese philosophical aesthetics reveals the assimilation of this logic most clearly. The other movement, haunted by the fear that Asia is incommensurable and hence unassimilable, will be a movement of containment. Thus the discourse of modern Chinese philosophical aesthetics will appeal directly to the notion of the image/figure and the type, the essence of which is expressed perhaps most vividly in Walt Whitman’s poetics of U.S. nationalism. This logic of universality is central not only to Whitman, and Chinese socialist realist aesthetics, 28 My use of the term “para-human”, here, is very much of the same conceptual register as what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy discuss, in “Nazi Myth”, in terms of the “image or the type of the Aryan” and the “nonbeings” and “lesser beings”: “The Aryan will have to be much more than a world ruled and exploited by the Aryans: it will have to be a world become Aryan (thus it will be necessary to eliminate from it the nonbeing or nontype par excellence, the Jew, as well as the nonbeing or lesser being of several other inferior or degenerate types, gypsies, for example)” (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Nazi Myth”, 311).

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but also, perhaps more germanely to the current historical juncture; it is likewise a crucial feature of the recent U. S. neo-conservative desire to consolidate a unipolar Pax Americana.29 The Hegelian vision of aesthetics that Derrida analyses with such clarity in Glas was a resource which Chinese dialectical materialism in the 1940s and 1950s was in no position simply to reject, nor did it feel compelled to do so.30 Even if we grant that Chinese dialectical materialism would develop an almost pathological squeamishness about mysticism and religion as idealisms, the essential philosophemes deployed in socialist realist aesthetics, namely notions of the real, ideality, essence, phenomenality, materiality, and spirituality, and the like, were not nearly so easily purged of the trappings of metaphysics, nor of that logic of the figure, which, as I noted earlier, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, after Heidegger, term onto-typology. Further, the identification of this discourse of the human (and the para-human that haunts it) with Hegelianism could easily lead us to believe that it was primarily a continental (Old) European metaphysical doctrine somehow run amok in China, now so long out of favor that it requires little further attention. Why bother sorting through the Hegelian stakes of Chinese dialectical materialist aesthetics, if we have already dismissed Chinese dialectical materialism itself as, at best, irrelevant to the task of (true) philosophy and, at worst, dangerously wrong? And yet, as will become clear, the logic of universality governs not only Hegel’s treatment of the human, but Cai Yi’s philosophical aesthetic notion of the type (dianxing). This notion of the aesthetic type carefully follows the humanist logic of universality that provided the metaphysical foundation for the 19th- and 20th-century category of the human. Especially the North American discourse of the Yellow Peril is unintelligible in the absence of these theoretical/theological dimensions. Though nearly every discussion of socialist realism contains an obligatory (and generally dismissive) reference to the notion of the typical, Cai’s essential work on the theory of types is rarely ever mentioned. Deemed a residue of the excessive politicization of art, little analytical energy has been brought to bear on this crucially important concept.

29 See for example Neil Smith’s “After the American Lebensraum: ‘Empire,’ Empire, and Globalization,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 5,2 (2003): 249–270. 30 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. & Richard Rand (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).

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Not surprisingly, this neglect generates its own ironic (uncanny) returns. Curiously, one of the early exponents of the aesthetics of the typical, Walt Whitman, tends to be cited by precisely those who sought to extract the political from modern and contemporary Chinese literature. The concept of the typical is, however, itself much too central to both Cai Yi’s project and Whitman’s, as, indeed, it is to that of Mao Zedong in his Yan’an Talks, to permit such an excision. All three thinkers share a commitment to a notion of universality that speaks directly, as if in answer to the problem of the para-human evidenced in the discourse of the Yellow Peril. The element of universality and its fundamental links with the concept of the type as the figure of the human require of us that we treat Chinese romantic identifications with Walt Whitman (read antagonism to the oppressive dictates of socialist realism) with scepticism at the very least.31 I will begin first, however, with Cai theory of the artistic type. Cai Yi and the Dialectical Materialist Artistic Type I turn now to an elucidation of Cai Yi’s dialectical materialist theory of the type which is directly linked to the problem of thinking in images 31 As is well known in modern Chinese literature studies, numerous May 4th New Culture literary figures of the early 1920s looked to Walt Whitman for inspiration, including especially Guo Moruo 郭沫若, Tian Han 田汉, Hu Shi 胡适 and Xu Zhimo 徐志摩. Huang Guiyou, for example, misconstrues the relation between Whitman’s “internationalism” and his “national chauvinism”: “Yet Whitman’s robust internationalism should not be lost in the zealous overtones of national chauvinism. Whitman in this poem [‘Salut au Monde’] takes on two voices, the national poet and the world lover: he is the former first and the latter second. Such a juxtaposition of the two roles suggests that, for the poet, it is a matter of priority and not one of contradiction. If we can find no reconciliation between the two voices, we still need to remember that the American bard demonstrates a high degree of goodwill and a large spirit of generosity towards people other than himself and nations other than Americans” (Huang Guiyou, “Whitman on Asian Immigration and Nation-Formation,”in Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman, ed. Ed Folsom [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002], 159–171, 164. As Cai Yi, Mao Zedong and no doubt Whitman all fundamentally understood, the relationship between the national and international moments was essentially dialectical and assuredly not one of “priority.” I would argue strongly that one must be very wary of endorsing Whitman’s nationalism simply because it appears leavened with an appropriate measure of “internationalism.” The project of Empire requires just this dialectical relation between the species and the genus. The logic of species and genus in its relation to modern nationalisms, U. S. and Chinese, needs to be brought to the fore, especially in the case of Whitman who is seen as the romantic alternative to the dominance of the Chinese state in arts and literature.

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treated earlier. To begin with, I will provide a discussion of the theory of types as it is developed in both the New Theory of Art and also in New Aesthetics. It is in these two works that Cai attempts to make good on the promise of providing a dialectical materialist means of grasping the typical in reality as the basis for producing exemplary artistic types in the work of art. In part, what I would like to show in this chapter is that the problems of the type and typicality in Cai’s work are derived from an engagement with several pre-Marxist texts, in particular Hegel. Given my effort to link the concept of the type to the much broader sweep of the institution of modern literature, I would like to emphasize that the concept is not solely derived from a reading of Marx and Engel’s thoughts on the issue.32 Marx and Engels’ endorsement of a notion of typicality was clearly essential to the concept’s gradual institutionalization in China. And yet as anyone familiar with the Letters in which Marx and Engles discuss the typical are well aware, neither of the two offers anything approximating the epistemology of image thought that Cai provides. Cai, on the other hand, is clearly committed to the belief that in order to realize fully the value of Marxism in the study of modern aesthetics, one must read not only Marx and Engels, but rather accompany Marx and Engels in their reading of important philosophical texts, whether ancient Greek or modern German idealist. In other words, the full significance of Marxism for the problem of art in China after 1940 can only be understood in the much broader context of the philosophical aesthetic modernity. On this level, the various themes of the human in formation, the nation, the emergence of China as a national subject, the problem of universality, etc., are all themes that can be addressed collectively through an examination of the Marxist aesthetics Cai attempts to construct. It is essential to recognize just how much Cai’s concept of universality owes to the Hegelian tradition that is taken up in Chinese dialectical

32 Paul Pickowicz argues that Ch’ü was the first Chinese to be influenced by the work of Lukács (Paul Pickowicz, Marxist Literary Thought in China: The Influence of Ch‘ü Ch‘iu-Pai) [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981], 120n25. Pickowicz discuss Ch’ü’s reception of Marx and Engels’ Letters to Lassalle. Pickowicz neglects any mention of the fundamental issue at stake in those letters, especially for Lukács, namely the problem of typicality. For a discussion of the Letters, Lukács and the problem of the typical, see Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 191.

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materialist paradigmatically in Li Da 李达, whom I will discuss below.33 Only in doing so is it possible for us to grasp the philosophical force which governs the role of the eidaesthetic type in modern Chinese literature. In other words, Cai’s appeal to the conceptual rubric of dialectical materialism is designed to provide a solid ontological foundation for the artistic creation of types. Initially, I want simply to highlight the extent to which Chinese discussions of aesthetics beginning in the early 1940s, especially with Cai Yi’s work, sought to align Chinese Marxist cultural theory with key elements of modern philosophy. This should also indicate the degree to which in China in the 20th century a very strong need was felt to provide a thoroughgoing philosophical account of literature.34 As in the previous chapter, my interest lies more in better understanding his participation in the global project of modern eidaesthetics. There can also be little doubt that the very dialectical materialism that Cai Yi uses to construct his aesthetics is one heavily indebted to a (post-)metaphysical conception of human subjectivity. Cai Yi, like nearly all of his Marxist contemporaries, clearly felt that the materialist dimension of his aesthetics constituted its own critique of metaphysics. On this count, Chinese Marxism shared with Heidegger a desire to overcome the modern legacy of metaphysics. Cai begins his discussion of the type by noting the distinction between art and science, distinguishing them according to their respective means of reflection, namely image and theory (xingxiang 形象 and lilun 理论). This distinction is further rendered according to the now familiar formula that holds that scientific truth is the universal encompassing the individual, while artistic knowledge is the individual revealing the universal. Cai compares the work of artistic creation to the work of scientific practice.

For a comprehensive account of the Chinese Marxist theorist Li Da’s work, see Nick Knight’s Li Da and Marxist Philosophy in China (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1996). 34 It will help to better understand what Cai Yi attempts here, if we recall that the philosophical scope of his work differs from the other accounts of modern Chinese realism I have examined earlier, primarily in terms of degree. Of course, Cai’s dialectical materialist orientation places him at an obvious, distant remove from especially Marsten Anderson, C. T. Hsia, David Wang, and Michael Duke. But as I have shown, each of these critics, if in different ways, situates his critical approach in reference to the major tropes in modern philosophy. Both Liu Kang and Tang Xiaobing differ very substantially from Cai Yi, as well, though much more in terms of a critical reflection on the limitations of mid-20th-century Chinese dialectical materialism. 33

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Here the artistic image, in which the individual reveals the universal, is the so-called type . . . [ W ]hat science has knowledge of are abstract laws, while art has knowledge of concrete types . . . Artistic expression is originally a mimesis (moxie 摹写) of artistic knowledge, and so what art expresses is precisely the type. Therefore artistic creation is precisely the creation of types.35

Cai then addresses what he terms the “broad determination,” (guangfan de guiding 广泛的规定) concerning objects in reality, namely how they are formed from a unity of the universal and the individual. In New Theory of Art it is towards the essence (benzhi ) as universal that all aesthetic cognition of reality is directed. Cai terms this definition of the thing a “broad determination” since it is meant to be true of all things in objective reality, but it does not exhaust the nature of the type. Objective things are always in a state of flux and no objective thing is ever entirely independent from other things. In our everyday awareness of things around us, most objects do appear as fully discrete entities, able to maintain an abiding, unitary constancy. And yet what ultimately characterizes such objects is both change and interconnection with other things.36 An object is thus both similarity amidst difference and stasis amidst flux, and can never be said to be a sheer difference from all other things, nor can it be characterized as pure stasis. Its relative difference from other things exists solely by virtue of its similarity to other things. Likewise, the relative stasis we may find in the object exists only because of the flux and change that characterizes even so apparently stable an object as a mineral specimen.37 All of this is meant to indicate that an object abides by the “law of the unity of opposites,” which Li Da characterizes as the heart of the dialectical materialist method.38 The unity of what opposes itself within the object—whether

CYWJ: 1, 91. Cai writes, “The connection between the individual, objective, real thing and other things then constitutes its various attributes, conditions and similarity with other things, as well the possibility of mutual influence between them” (CYWJ: 1, 92). 37 “The law of dialectics acknowledges that the world is eternally moving, eternally changing; all forms of movement are in transformation; all existing things are interconnected, and between all portions of the world there is extremely complicated interaction” (Li Da 李达, Li Da wenji 李达文集, vol. 2 [Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980], 124). 38 Such a conception of reality is explained by Li Da: “Beginning with atoms all the way through to the most complicated phenomena of human society and human thought, all things or phenomena each possess internal contradiction. There exists nothing in the world that does not possess this contradiction. The interior of all things 35 36

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necessity and contingency, change and flux, identity and similarity, or individuality and universality, is what constitutes the object. For Cai Yi, in order to understand the relation between objective phenomena and the laws that govern them, we must be able to grasp the dialectical moments that constitute those phenomena. Only in grasping stasis and flux, similarity and difference, etc. as essential, constitutive moments in the object can a proper understanding of the relation between individual and universal emerge. This dialectical materialist conception of the object derives ultimately from Hegel. The section on “sense certainty” early in his Phenomenology of Spirit is helpful here in understanding the dialectical emergence of the thing and problem of the individual and the universal. There, Hegel makes the point that one can only speak of the individual in terms of the universal. Whatever the object or whatever its composition, it exists as an object of thought for us, only insofar as we think it through universals.39 Cai’s “broad determination” of the unity of the individual and the universal adopts just such a view as Hegel details here.40 Hegel is concerned to avoid the extremes of empty abstraction—universals with no determinate content whatsoever, or pure singularities that could never occur as objects of thought. Hegel has shown that we cannot think an object save by means of universals. Nominalism would hold that the universal by means of which we think the object is not an attribute of the object, but rather an attribute of the mind which contemplates the object.41 As such, that universal becomes the mere name of the object, rather than an essential determination of the object. Here it has an opposition of various elements. The opposition of these elements is the thing which creates the thing’s contradictions” (Li Da, Li Da wenji, 125). 39 “It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: ‘This,’ i.e. the universal This; or, ‘it is,’ ” i.e. Being in general. Of course, we do not envisage the universal This or Being in general, but we utter the universal; in other words, we do not strictly say what in this sense-certainty we mean to say . . . it is just not possible for us ever to say, or express in words, a sensuous being that we mean” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold V. Miller, analysis of the text and foreword by J. N. Findlay [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 60, italics mine). Hegel defines a universal as a “simple thing . . . which is through negation.” In other words, the “this” is a “this” because it is a “not-This, and is with equal indifference This as well as That” (Hegel, Phenomenology, 60). 40 John W. Burbidge explains, “Any universal is insubstantial and indeterminate. What is concrete is pure individuality. This process, then ends with nominalism; the claim that thoughts, as abstract, have no reality, and that individuals, as concrete, cannot be thought” ( John W. Burbidge, On Hegel’s Logic: Fragments of a Commentary [Atlantic Highlands N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995], 113–14). 41 Burbidge, “Hegel’s Logic,” 114.

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is worth recalling that for Cai’s dialectical materialism, what characterizes the dynamic process of the object in its inward contradiction, likewise applies to the subject that thinks it. In other words, what is true objectively about the object is equally true of the process of knowledge through which the mind comes to know it. As this brief discussion of Hegel should suggest, Cai’s conception of the object as constituted dialectically is crucial to understanding the nature of the type. I noted above that Cai has already made the point that the “broad determination” of the object is inadequate as a definition of the type, and yet it is solely on the basis of this determination of the thing as a unity of the individual and the universal that one can understand the type. The types, however, both in reality and as they are represented in art differ. It is only by virtue of the fact that types exist in reality that one is able to generate them in art through the creative process.42 Yet the artistic process is not one of merely copying these types as they are discovered in reality. How is the type in reality related to the type as it is expressed in the artistic work, and in what way do they differ? The type represents a special class of things that reveal the essence (universality) of the thing. With some things, the individual element is “superior and prominent,” while in others, what is dominant is the universal element. Cai gives the common example of someone saying, “Lisi is a typical revolutionary. . . . Li Si 李四 possesses all of the requirements (tiaojian 条件) of a revolutionary and these requirements figure prominently in his character.”43 While Cai admits that this example is not entirely adequate, it does offer the sense in which an individual (person, in this case) as existing in social reality is capable of manifesting the universal. Thus a type is defined by its capacity to reflect some form of universality. This makes it different from the generic thing, which under any circumstances will always of necessity be a unity of the individual and the universal. Cai’s interest lies only in those things through which the universal allows its light to be revealed. The fundamental fact of change and transformation that governs all things, governs both natural and social phenomena. Cai treats each according to what he terms the “basic conditions of determination”

42 43

CYWJ: 1, 92. CYWJ: 1, 93.

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( jiben guiding tiaojian 基本规定条件).44 Our examination of nature proceeds along the lines established by these basic conditions of determination, namely what Cai terms species (zhongshu 种属), while our examination of the category of society must proceed according to the determination of social class or stratum ( jieji huo jieceng 阶级或阶层).45 An analogy is set up between the way objects in nature are categorized according to species and the way human society organizes itself into groupings along class lines. Cai would acknowledge any number of other possible or existing groups, but he clearly sees in the grouping of economic class a determining condition of central importance. Cai has moved gradually from things in objective reality in general, to types in reality, to finally an analysis of how these latter differ from artistic types. He begins by noting that the formation of an artistic type is directly related to artistic knowledge. Artistic knowledge relies on the “analytical and generalizing power of subjective spirit, and the power of abstraction and concretion.”46 As I showed in the preceding chapter, we are here presented with two forms of knowledge, one highly abstract, and the other, highly visual and hence extremely concrete. Between these two extremes lies artistic knowledge. Scientific knowledge is abstract and lacks the immediate, particular characteristics accessible to sense experience. On the other end of the scale there is the photograph, which is both particular and fully sensuous in that it is given to the sense. To this degree, the artistic image will be much closer to the photograph, but it is much richer and comprehensive of the class of things it represents. Artistic knowledge is the product of a two-part process. First, the characteristics of typical things in reality are selected. These characteristics are then generalized (gaikuo 概括), after which these generalized universal characteristics are subjected to the process of “concretion” and “individuation.” The process of generalization does not proceed randomly, from one contingent characteristic to another, but rather develops according to the “relations between things in objective reality,” taking the universal as its basis:47

44 45 46 47

CYWJ: CYWJ: CYWJ: CYWJ:

1, 1, 1, 1,

95. 96. 97. 97.

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Therefore although artistic type is also the unity of the individual and the universal, nonetheless it is not merely like the type in reality, in which the universal is only the superior and the outstanding. In the artistic type, the universal element is simply decisive, and the individual elements are subordinate to it.48

The artistic type thus cannot be conceived in terms of a mere copy of a given objective singular thing, though mimetic representation is clearly essential to the realist artistic practice Cai Yi is describing. Nor is the artistic type simply a re-presentation of some other real type. This is perhaps the most crucial distinction since this is where human social reality is transformed in the artistic work into something that exceeds and even transgresses the given reality out of which it emerges. The type presents itself not only as a unity of the individual and the universal, but a unity that in its entirety is formed on the basis of the universal as the structuring, organic principle. In the artistic work, the contingent and arbitrary aspects do not occlude the light of the universal, but render it rather more concrete. Reality in its phenomenal aspect must be transformed and processed. As Cai phrases it, the artistic type is the “enlargement, deepening and centralizing of the universality” of the thing.49 The relation then between the artistic type and the real type can thus be considered in terms of a vocabulary of intensification: it is “higher, more complete, more typical.” The real type must be further distinguished from the artistic type, since the latter is the product of the active, subjective transformation of the real by the artist. The artistic type is thus the product of a more intensive amplification of the universal moment, in which the latter is made “central” and “fundamental.”50 This point should become clearer in the final chapter where I examine more fully the complex problem of universality in the socialist realist Bildungsroman. Suffice it here to say that this intensification of some typical element of reality, does not land one beyond the Real. Rather, the universality that is presented in the type, especially human types, 48 CYWJ: 1, 97. We should keep in mind that artistic type is created according to the process examined in the previous chapter, in which it is the individual thing that makes manifest the universal. Cai Yi here is addressing the problem of the relative weight accorded to the elements that comprise the artistic type. 49 “[ The artistic type] is the transformation in art of the individual objective real thing” (CYWJ: 1, 97). 50 CYWJ: 1, 98.

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affirms something more inclusive and universal of human being, as such. In the novels, as we shall see, what is figured is not simply the universality of the revolutionaries as artistic types, in and of themselves. Rather, as typical revolutionaries they embody the organic formation of revolutionary subjectivity through their affirmation of universality. For Cai, the artistic types must be considered in light of the relation between the typical person and the typical environment. The category of class is not considered on its own in objective isolation, but achieves significance in relation to history and the nation. The distinction between a lower-level type (diji de dianxing 低级的典型) and a higher-level type (gaoji de dianxing 高级的典型) is indicated by the more global, inclusive scope of the latter. And yet it is vital to keep in mind that for Cai Yi, this higher-level type, in its actual artistic representation, remains more singular, specific, and concrete. Such types are more universal, but it is clear that what makes them universal is their capacity to provide an ever more precise approximation of humanity in its species-being. The individual characteristics that form the type are grasped artistically in their unity, and as such the type is created in a manner categorically different from the determination of a mere common denominator in mathematics.51 A true artistic type is rather an organic formation. In this sense, it is in full accord with the logic of the System-subject I examined earlier in The Literary Absolute. How these characteristics are made “concretely manifest” in the person of the individual character moves the relation between the individual and universal.52 To focus purely on universality in the formation of the “artistic image” produces only model-type (leixing 类型) rather than a proper type (dianxing). The example that Cai provides are the masks in traditional Chinese opera, namely those of the “loyal official” (zhongchen 类型忠臣奸臣) and the “treacherous official” ( jianchen 奸臣). These characters are not artistic types, in Cai’s sense, but are rather mere model-types. First, though it is clear that the loyal official will differ entirely from the treacherous official, this difference is realized solely and completely in relation to the treacherous official. Because the two characters exist in mere static opposition to one another their difference remains therefore abstract. This abstract difference lacks the true specificity and individuality that would render the character of the

51 52

CYWJ: 1, 102. CYWJ: 1, 103.

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official both concrete and individual. Only such clearly and concretely delineated individuality could produce a true type. Here the real difference in the loyal official would manifest itself relative to other loyal officials. This difference lies in how the loyal minister assumes his role as an actual individual within a given historical, social formation. It is his individuality and the precise ways in which his personality is brought to bear on the social problems and contradictions of his historical era that enable the concrete manifestation of the universal in the individual. In a discussion of Plato’s Symposium, this is what Lukács terms “intellectual physiognomy”: The ideas of the individuals are not abstract, generalized and unmotivated. Instead the total personality of each character is synthesized and exemplified through his mode of thinking, in his mode of self-expression and in his conclusion regarding the subject at hand . . . A group of living people emerges before us, unforgettably etched in their individuality. And all these people have been individualized exclusively through their intellectual physiognomy, distinguished one from the other and developed into individuals who are simultaneously types.53

This individuality forms itself only within a clearly described typical environment (dianxing huanjing 典型环境). The typical environment is comprised of three different elements—namely the overall quality and direction of the development of the society as a whole, the more immediate material and spiritual surroundings, and finally, the actual, individual incidents. On the one hand, the main currents and tendencies in the social formation must find expression in and through individual persons. The overall movement of society is concretized and individualized in a character as a member of a society. In sum, the practice of artistic knowledge as a process enables the discovery of the universal as essence. That process of artistic creation that, as Cai Yi has shown, differs radically from a static mimetic representation of what the artist discovers, demands the crafting of the artistic type in a literary work.

53 Georg Lukács, “Writer and Critic” and Other Essays, trans. Arthur D. Kahn (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1971), 149–188, 150. The concept of the type both as it was initially deployed by Lu Xun and as it was taken up by Cai Yi and Chinese criticism in general does not come from Lukács but rather from earlier Russian theorists. It is certainly true that Lukács wrote at length on the issue, but it is not the case that his ideas were the ones first introduced into China on the subject.

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chapter four Cai Yi’s Typical Humanity and Walt Whitman’s Literary Eidaesthetics of the Nation

It is vital at this point to examine how Cai Yi’s philosophical elucidation of the artistic type is fully aligned with the eidaesthertic itinerary of modern literature, such as I have defined it earlier. What I would like to show is that the logic that governs the type in Chinese socialist realist theory beginning in the 1940s shares a deeper connection to literary theoretical currents considerably more distant in geopolitical space than either Lukács or Marx and Engles. Nor is it sufficient to note that Walt Whitman, whom I will compare to Cai Yi, derived much of his aesthetic vision in especially Democratic Vistas (1871) from resources that were equally Hegelian. Rather, I want to argue in what follows that Cai Yi’s philosophical aesthetics is best understood against the much broader historical backdrop of literary and aesthetic modernity, beginning most acutely with the Jena romantics whose work I discussed in chapter one. But it is just as essential to keep in mind that my purpose has been to indicate just how much Cai Yi’s aesthetic theory of the type shares with the contemporary institution of literary study in the Western academy. That Cai Yi grounds his philosophical aesthetics in dialectical materialism would seem to mark its radical difference and distance from the practices of literary criticism in the Western academy, especially the study of modern Chinese literature.54 Here it is vital to recall a point I made in the introduction in reference to Michael Duke. It should by now be apparent that the aesthetic logic of exemplarity and universality that governs Cai Yi’s philosophical aesthetics likewise substantially informs Duke’s description of the essential features of the study of modern Chinese literature. Duke’s effort to distinguish literature from science, his emphasis on the typical, the relationship 54 Perhaps the most decisive difference is less diamat itself, than Cai Yi’s compunction to ground his aesthetic theory in a comprehensive and all encompassing “cosmologyontology,” to use Zizek’s characterization of one element of Mao Zedong thought. “One should be very precise in diagnosing, at the very abstract level of theory, where Mao was right and where he was wrong. Mao was right in rejecting the standard notion of “dialectical synthesis” as the “reconciliation” of the opposites, as a higher unity which encompasses their struggle; he was wrong in formulating this rejection, this insistence on the priority of struggle, division, over every synthesis or unity, in the terms of a general cosmology-ontology of the “eternal struggle of opposites”—this is why he got caught in the simplistic, properly non-dialectical, notion of the “bad infinity” of struggle” (Zizek, “Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule,” 8–9).

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between the individual and universality of the human condition, the privilege of literature and art over theory, directly correspond to the central conceptual themes in Cai Yi’s aesthetic theory that I have examined above. For Duke, “modern and contemporary Chinese literature” serves finally to figure, in exemplary fashion, for its reader “what modern and contemporary Chinese people are.”55 My point is ultimately that if Duke seems to ventrioloquate Cai Yi the theorist of Chinese socialist realist aesthetics it is simply because of the investment each shares in exemplarity as the crux of what Marc Redfield terms “aesthetic pedagogy.”56 Redfield captures precisely the reason why Cai Yi’s Chinese Marxist artistic doctrine of exemplarity in the dialectical materialist form of the type, once understood on its own terms, in fact resonates so powerfully within the institution of modern literature studies in the North American academy: If I now propose to shift attention from the panoramic unfolding of politico-aesthetic narrative to the strange but socioeconomically minute phenomenon of “theory” in late twentieth-century North America (and, mutatis mutandis, other major centers for the production of “Western” literary culture), it is on the strength of the observation that aesthetic pedagogy was fully institutionalized in the twentieth century, with the development of national literature studies in the modern, bureaucratic university. It must also be emphasized that the university has a relatively minor part to play in the diffusion of aesthetic narrative in West . . . But the university serves our culture as, among other things, the museum of “culture” per se, which grants the humanities a symbolic role considerably in excess of their actual contribution to the school’s explicit or implicit socioeconomic rationale. And within the humanities, the national literature department, based on the elucidation and dissemination of an imaginary totality or “canon” of exemplary vernacular texts, provides aesthetic pedagogy with its most developed institutional elaboration.57

We should recall the series of critical interventions that precipitated Duke’s article revolved around the problems of both “theory” and the “canon” in modern Chinese literary studies. Indeed, while broadly speaking the contemporary institution of literary studies within the humanities sustains itself on the basis of aesthetic pedagogy, the “diffusion” of literary and aesthetic modernity is fully global and became so very much despite the relatively minor contribution of the humanities 55 56 57

Duke, “Thoughts,” 64. Redfield, Phantom Formations, 27. Redfield, Phantom Formations, 27.

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in the modern university. Indeed, what is most compelling about the problem of aesthetic pedagogy itself is that its modern historical career is so abundantly apparent beyond the walls of the academy. In the remainder of this chapter, I want therefore to explore another trajectory of modern eidaesthetics that links Chinese socialist aesthetics to Walt Whitman’s poetics of nationalism. As should by now be apparent, my purpose here is to argue that if mid-20th-century Chinese socialist realism appears to draw rather belatedly upon a 19th-century North American poetics, it is only because the very logic of aesthetic exemplarity that subtends each has, as well, powerfully shaped our own institutional practices as scholars of literature in the humanities. I begin with Walt Whitman who clearly connected the project of American nationalism to what he understood as Hegel’s philosophical project of Reason. For example, in a footnote to an essay in Specimen Days on Thomas Carlyle, Whitman writes, [A]ll the principal works of both [Carlyle and Hegel] might not inappropriately be this day collected and bound up under the conspicuous title: “Speculations for the use of North America, and Democracy there, with the relations of the same to Metaphysics, including Lessons and Warnings (encouragements too, and of the vastest,) from the Old World to the New.”58

Given that Cai’s theory of types develops a number of categories found in Hegel’s Science of Logic, his approach is necessarily a good deal more rigorous than Whitman’s, and yet as especially this analysis of Cai Yi and Whitman will amply underscore, the poetic and the philosophical are merely two moments within the underlying continuum that forms the modern concept of literature. As I will show, what might otherwise appear initially as the distant and alien thematics of Chinese socialist realist aesthetics powerfully and uncannily echo on a deeper level concerns much closer to home, namely the theme of U. S. nationalism. Indeed, not only does Whitman provide extraordinary insights into the philosophemes that Cai develops in his work, but the U. S. poet’s 58 Walt Whitman, “Carlyle from American Points of View” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, (Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1982), 890–899, 890. In the same essay, Whitman writes, “Theology, Hegel translates into science” (897). Whitman’s relationship to Hegel has been the subject of debate for nearly a century. For an informed discussion of the problem, see Kathryne V. Lindberg, “Whitman’s ‘Convertible Terms’’: America, Self, Ideology,” in Theorizing American Literature: Hegel, the Sign, and History, ed. Bainard Cowan and Joseph G. Kronick (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 233–268.

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Democratic Vistas can help render intelligible the real stakes of one of the most important and controversial documents on art in 20th-century China, namely Mao’s Yan’an Talks. The deep connections between Cai, Whitman and Mao are far from coincidental. Given space limitations I will confine myself to addressing how Cai’s aesthetic type is formed according to a logic of universality clearly articulated in Whitman’s aesthetics of U. S. nationalism. In Democratic Vistas, Whitman writes: Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba . . . The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours. There will be daily electric communication with every part of the globe. What an age! What a land! Where, elsewhere, one so great? The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world. Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be? Bear in mind, though, that nothing less than the mightiest original non-subordinated SOUL has ever really, gloriously led, or ever can lead. (This Soul—its other name, in these Vistas, is LITERATURE.)59

The vision of Empire that Whitman evokes is clear enough, and yet the Vistas take as their premise the conviction that neither material progress, geographical expansion, nor even democratic political institutions are adequate to fulfill the vision of universality that Empire demands. The speculative aesthetic project of the Vistas is meant to show the way forward for the U. S. in assuming the mantle of global leadership and dominion. Whitman admits to being “continually haunted” by the “fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close.”60 Confronted with the spectre of an “irreconcilable” heterogeneity and its corollary in the Vistas, the dread absence of a fully developed “American personality,” the essay returns obsessively to the spiritual demand of literary archetypes. As the above quote asserts unequivocally, it is precisely the “individuality of nation,” in other words, only something whose essence is authentically “American,” that “can ever lead.” As Cai Yi develops it in a more elaborately theoretical manner, the archetype acquires its universalizing force only through being radically individuated—marked, in the case of Whitman as a specifically American “personality.” As I mentioned above, it is crucial to understand that the relation between

59 60

Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 981. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 935.

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the national and international moments is dialectical. It is not simply that one cannot have one without the other, but that they are mutually constitutive. Whitman clearly understands that the poetic capture of the essence of the American “stock personality” will offer the image of the universal. A certain historical necessity will govern Cai’s and Mao’s compunction, some seventy years later, to address aesthetics and art in a manner closely aligned with Whitman and in very much the same Hegelian philosophical idiom detailed above. Given the importance that Cai Yi ascribes to image thought (xingxiang siwei), it is not surprising that he devotes an entire chapter of his first work, New Theory of Art, published in 1942, to types (dianxing). Indeed, much of Cai’s early work reads like a theoretical elucidation of the aesthetic project of Whitman’s Democratic Vistas. The logic of universality appears in Cai’s work through a dialectical analysis of the relation between scientific and artistic knowledge. The type, as it exists in reality, is something more than a mere unity of the individual and the universal. The type “is not merely the universal within the individual, nor the unity of the individual and the universal.” The type must also be conceived in terms of the individual that reveals the universal. The distinction between the individual/universal relation in an object in general and the individual/universal relation in a type turns finally upon the term “reveal.” Not all objects possess the requisite conditions to make manifest their universality. The unity of individual and universal in objects, in general, is “no mere mechanical concentration” ( jixie de jizhong 机械的集中) but is a function of “organic formation,” What precisely determines the degree to which either the universality or the individuality of the thing predominates is the “quality, quantity and form” (zhi, liang he xingtai 质, 量和形态) that constitute the thing.61 Thus, whether or not the given object presents the universal is a function of its qualitative and quantitative formation. As I showed in the previous chapter, while according to Cai’s dialectical analysis all things are unities of the individual and the universal, his interest lies only in those things through which the universal allows its light to be revealed. The ultimate aim of Cai’s analysis is to reveal

61 Cai is here referring to Hegel’s reading in the Science of Logic of the relationship between quality and quantity. Qualitative change is determined by quantitative change. Incremental quantitative change in a phenomenon results in no transformation in quality until a specific limit is reached. Once that quantitative limit is reached, a “leap” occurs resulting in the transformation in quality.

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both the logic and the effective power of the artistic type and its links to the human. The human is constituted dialectically in the same way that all other things are constituted. The human, however, can reflect upon this process and come to know its own dialectical formation and bear witness to it as history. But here the problem of the type, as Whitman well understood, is oriented not to the past, nor to the coming to know of that past as knowledge, but rather toward the future. The type must be fashioned and it must indicate the future course of history, which the human, as such, will take in the process of realizing itself. Thus, not only is it the case that the human is formed in history and that its history can be known through the epistemological process (renshi de guocheng), but also that to the human falls the burden of consciously presenting itself. Its essence is nowhere fully realized, since the human is still a work in progress. Its essence can be grasped, however, even though what is grasped will need to be presented in some concrete form so as to figure its truth. The national stakes in this figuration are, for Whitman, and for Cai as well, world historical.62 Artistic knowledge relies on the “analytical and generalizing power of subjective spirit and the power of abstraction and concretion”: [Artistic knowledge] is the generalization of the characteristics revealed by the universal attributes and conditions of numerous and varied individual objective, real things. These characteristics are then synthesized into a concrete and individual image. This concrete, individual image is precisely the artistic type. Put this way, it is neither like scientific knowledge, which is only the synthesis and generalization of abstract universal things, nor is it like a photograph which is merely a copy or re-presentation (zaixian 再现) of the individual thing.63

According to Cai’s analysis, the photograph offers only a mechanical reproduction of the real, and therefore offers no means to process that reality by means of the human subjective spirit. The importance of this point was not lost on Whitman, who felt a similar need to take from reality a full measure of concrete, real attributes and out of these material conditions fashion a type, yet do so in a manner that would not simply and statically reflect reality like a photograph: At the conclusion of his chapter on types, Cai Yi writes that “types are, to paraphrase Old Hegel” (lao Heige’er 老黑格尔) . . . precisely matters of world-historical concern (CYWJ: 1, 111). 63 CYWJ: 1, 97. 62

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chapter four [T]he poet, the esthetic worker in any field, by the divine magic of his genius, projects them, their analogies, by curious removes, indirections, in literature and art. (No useless attempt to repeat the material creation, by daguerreotyping the exact likeness by mortal mental means.) This is the image-making faculty, coping with material creation, and rivaling, almost triumphing over it.64

This transformation of the given reality as the image-making faculty is what Cai terms subjective spirit (zhuguan jingshen 主观精神). This faculty of the imagination is what enables the formation of type. But this faculty is likewise central to the process of artistic knowledge that enables the writer to discover the universal in the shifting, arbitrary, and contingent forms of phenomenal reality. The artistic type cannot be conceived in terms of a mere copy of a given objective singular thing. Nor is the artistic type simply a re-presentation of some existing type in reality. This is perhaps the most crucial distinction since this is where reality is transformed into something other or more than the given itself, and yet in a manner which unveils the essence of the real. The type presents itself not only as a unity of the individual and the universal, but a unity that in its entirety is formed on the basis of the universal as the structuring principle. Contingent and arbitrary aspects do not occlude the light of the universal. Reality in its phenomenal aspect must be transformed and processed. As Cai phrases it, the artistic type is the “enlargement, deepening and centralizing of the universality” of the thing. And yet this process cannot be one of mere abstraction. Rather, this process of figuration is one of concretion. Cai argues that the problem of the type can only be fully examined from the perspective of the social formation: The artistic type is always a unity of a class or a social universal and an individual, and the social universal is central, basic and decisive . . . Because the artistic type always takes class or social stratum ( jieceng) universals as both central and basic, the artistic type is therefore inextricably related to history, or we simply might say that the artistic type belongs to history.65

The artistic type is precisely historical because it is the product of the writer’s own human subjective transformation of the world. Thus, to introduce the social is to render the problem of aesthetics crucial to

64 65

Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 987. CYWJ: 1, 98.

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the problem of history. The formation of types guarantees China’s relation to history, or rather, Weltgeschichte. On this point it is useful to consider what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in quite another context, discuss as ideology:66 Ideology, in other words, interests us and claims our attention insofar as, on the one hand, it always presupposes itself as a political explanation of the world, that is, as an explanation of history (or still further, if you wish, as an explanation of Weltgeschichte: not the ‘history of the world’ but rather the “world-as-history”, a world consisting only of a process, and the necessity of that process) on the basis of a concept of a single concept—the concept of race, for example, or the concept of class.67

Cai himself addresses the nature of the type immediately within a discussion of both the essence of the human and history. The problem becomes the degree to which a given type in its expression of universality can encompass ever greater numbers of people. Higher-level types possess greater extension and thus are capable of representing more people: Now, does the artistic type have any limitation? In regard to this question, in terms of artistic types themselves, we cannot arrive at an answer. But, the relations in objective reality upon which are based artistic types originally have various kinds of stages. In terms of people, among the most important are naturally social stratum, class, race and era, etc.68

Crucially, however, this considerable scope is not one to which the artist is bound. Indeed, Cai argues that this scope can be transcended. In fact, this transcendence becomes human transcendence as such. On this level, the artist is no longer treating merely a person (ren 人) within a given social formation, conditioned by the various factors of “class, race (zhongzu 种族), era, etc.” Though this type will possess all of these determinate qualities in one specific form or another, this type is instead, human-kind (renlei 人类):

66 Their interest is in the role of myth in Nazism. There are very clear parallels between Cai’s analysis and what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy discuss, via Hannah Arendt, in terms of totalitarianism, as is suggested by the reference to “race” and “class” as alternative concepts with similar functions. And yet this should certainly not be construed as a conflation of Nazism with communism, nor especially, the CCP with the KMT. To do so would fail fundamentally to understand the nature and stakes of the bloody struggle between them in the 20th century. 67 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Nazi Myth,” 293. 68 CYWJ: 1, 99.

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chapter four With a truly great artist, the scope of his knowledge can move from the low level to the high level, and so the type she creates can reach a higher level from the lower level, even to the degree of creating in some sense, a human-kind type (renlei de dianxing 人类的典型). Have not Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cervantes’ Don Quixote been universally recognized as human-kind types?69

Cai has shown that the type is tied to history, and emerges through the universal of social class. It is therefore a necessary component in the positing of the social formation as such. Not only will such a type possess highly determinant characteristics, it is formed in the mind of the writer through an attention to the specificity of all of the moments that constitute a person as a social being. The movement from low level to high level type is a movement of transcendence, a movement from local to global or, in other words, from particular to universal: As for people, the writer need only truly and deeply observe and research a portion of a certain group, that is, a portion of this class of this nation (minzu 民族) during this era, and grasp their typical character in a typical environment. Then the person can become a high level typical character. Broadly speaking, the person can even transcend the scope of all low level [types] and become in some sense a human-kind typical character (renlei de dianxing renwu 人类典型的人物).70

The character that the writer produces emerges out of the writer’s examination of certain kinds of people who are all located in a specific class of a specific nation at a precise time in a given era. The character will be generalized out of many different people who share these three elements. The writer must at least typify the character to the degree that it expresses the primary contradictions out of which the present develops and which express the essential significance of the age or era that the writer treats. And yet, there remains the possibility that this character will so fully and typically manifest the essential conditions of its age, its people and its class, that a truly human type will be figured—one that, in its very national, historical, class concreteness, expresses and represents both the overall direction of the dialectical unfolding of history and the human, as such. This type would be a truly human archetype of the sort Whitman invokes continuously in Democratic Vistas. For Whitman “the deep lessons

69 70

CYWJ: 1, 99. CYWJ: 1, 99.

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of history and time” teach that everything in a nation’s accomplishment “defers, in any close and thorough-going estimate, until vitalized by national, original archetypes in literature.”71 The political form of democracy and all of the attendant material successes in the US in the 19th century fail in any significance, unless some poet should emerge and forge such a national archetype, presenting, as it were, the Idea of the nation. It is worth quoting Whitman at some length here: [B]ut the fear of conflicting and irreconcilable interiors, and the lack of a common skeleton, knitting all close, continually haunts me. Or, if it does not, nothing is plainer than the need, a long period to come, of a fusion of the States into the only reliable identity, the moral and artistic one. For, I say, the true nationality of the States, the genuine union, when we come to a moral crisis, is, and is to be, after all, neither the written law, nor (as is generally supposed), either self-interest, or common pecuniary or material objects but the fervid and the tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power.72

The nation, as Idea, can never be realized, and will always be fraught with dark fears of internal conflict, the inassimilable and the heterogeneous, unless the law as form is deployed to secure the stability of that identity. Nor will the sheer abundance of material power and military achievement provide for “true nationality.” The “Idea” of the nation must be fashioned and rendered accessible to “mortal sense” through its “national literature, especially its archetypal poems.”73 As I noted in the previous chapter, this is precisely what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe find in Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism as the “totally self-fulfilling (and willfully self-fulfilling) logic of an idea, an idea, “by which the movement of history is explained as a consistent process.”74 But for the nation to realize itself, the Idea of the nation in its universality must be posited in the form of particularization, a particular national identity. In doing so, it posits itself in a determinate, limited form of the type. In Cai’s terms, such a determinate type, a type fully endowed and richly embodied with the essence of a specific time, nation and class, can express the universality of the human as such, its species-being. These human types, originally meant to express the

71 72 73 74

Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” Complete Poetry and Prose Works, 929–994, 972. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 935–936. Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 932. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Nazi Myth”, 293.

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universality of a people, come to express the universality of the human as such. The movement is always a movement towards universality, and hence, the nation, in realizing itself for itself, can and must do so for others as well. That is why there is a constant shift throughout the speculative project of Whitman’s Vistas between the archetype of the American and the archetype of the human. A fully realized American archetype will above all represent the human in its universality. What this American archetype conveys to “mortal sense” is a “prophecy of the unknown,” not for America but for humanity, as such. We see that almost everything that has been written, sung or stated, of old, with reference to humanity under the feudal and Oriental institutes, religions and for other lands, needs to be re-written, re-sung, re-stated, in terms consistent with the institution of these States, and to come in range and obedient uniformity with them . . . We see our land, America, her literature, esthetics, &c., as, substantially, the getting in form, or effusement and statement, of the deepest basic elements and loftiest final meanings, of history and man—and the portrayal (under the eternal laws and conditions of beauty) of our own physiognomy.75

Whitman conceives of the archetype as the expression of the physiognomy of the American character. What is figured by this archetypal physiognomy is not simply the American character, as one particular among a host of others. Rather what the archetype brings to form is the ultimate meaning of history as such, along with man in his speciesbeing. For our purposes, what is crucial is that this formulation expresses the very logic of the type as Cai conceives it. To have formed a type is to have grasped the historical laws that govern the emergence of the (fully) human within a given historical, national and social formation. A true artistic type is an organic formation, or what Hegel terms the inner, organic formation. In other words, the type offers the figure of the human in its world-historical formation. It is important to reiterate that theoretical correspondences between Whitman’s effusive literary evocation of the American archetype and

75 Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 993–994. Huang mentions the term “typicality” (dianxingxing 典型性) once, but only in passing, when discussing a 1988 article by a Singapore scholar Wong Yoon Wah introducing terms of mainland Chinese literary criticism. No connection to Whitman is made, nor does Huang examine any Chinese discussions of the type (dianxing) as the term achieved widespread currency in China beginning in the 1930s. Huang Guiyou, Whitman, Imagism, and Modernism in China and America (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1997), 58.

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Cai Yi’s far more elaborate treatment of the type in his New Theory of Art cannot be accounted for by any notion of direct intellectual influence. Rather, as I have sought to argue, both Whitman and Cai, in remarkably similar ways, draw from the same modern philosophicalaesthetic discourse of the figure what we have seen Lacoue-Labarthe discuss, above, as onto-typology. That we find so rigorous an elucidation of the concept of the type in the work of a Chinese Marxist writing in the early 1940s needs to be understood, much more broadly, as an inevitable consequence of China’s coming directly to terms, via Marxism, with the modern (post-)metaphysical determination of the political as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have analysed it. Huang Guiyou’s 1997 book-length study of Whitman’s reception in China makes no reference to the problem of the archetype in Whitman, nor to any Chinese knowledge about or interest in this important facet of Whitman’s aesthetics.76 In Huang’s work, Whitman is understood primarily in terms of a romantic and democratic poet of the common man. Furthermore, the closest link Huang is able to assert between Whitman and Mao Zedong is via the latter’s endorsement of two important Chinese writers, Lu Xun and Guo Moruo, who both admired and translated some of Whitman’s poems. Through this endorsement, Mao is said to have “unconsciously and indirectly . . . contributed to Whitman’s warm reception in China.”77 As against this decidedly weak indirect linkage between Whitman and Mao, I am arguing that when Mao Zedong, in 1942, makes the statement that “life as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical ( geng dianxing 更典型), nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life,” he is drawing directly upon the much vaster and very modern (post-)metaphysical resources of onto-typology that I have explored here. That Mao’s speech was deemed the most important articulation of the relationship between politics, philosophy (even if schematically so, in the case of this document that was meant for the broadest possible consumption), and art in modern China, aligns it very substantially with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s determination of the fictioning of the political. As Simon Sparks glosses their cooperative interrogation of the essence of what constitutes the political,

76 77

Huang, Whitman, 62. Huang, Whitman, 63.

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chapter four The epoch of philosophy ‘actualizing’ itself as the political (and vice versa), is nothing other than the epoch of the bestowal of (the) meaning (of being, of existing) through figures. And this means, most decisively, through the figure of man, the figure of a human tupos [type] . . .78

Of course, if our understanding of Chinese romanticist invocations of Whitman, pitched against Maoist political incursions into the sphere of art and literature, needs to be tempered with a clear awareness of how closely allied Cai Yi’s (and Mao’s) socialist realist doctrine is to Whitman’s aesthetics, so too must we be wary of any facile equation of socialist realist aesthetics with fascism. That each draws heavily on the onto-theologics of the image is hardly adequate reason to equate them. To mistake Nazi propagandist Alfred Rosenberg for Georg Lukács, who was himself no less committed to the concept of the type, would simply conflate Right and Left, a dubious strategy that only serves the interests of what Zizek excoriates as the liberal democratic consensus.79 Furthermore, this deceptively comforting conflation would fail fundamentally to acknowledge just how deeply indebted Whitman’s democratic nationalist aesthetics was to the very same logic which informed Alfred Rosenberg’s Aryan type in his Myth of the Twentieth Century. As Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe urge in their analysis of Rosenberg, A comfortable security in the certitudes of morality and democracy not only guarantees nothing, but exposes one to the risk of not seeing the arrival, or the return, of that whose possibility is not due to any simple accident of history. An analysis of Nazism should never be conceived as a dossier of simple accusation, but rather as one element of a general deconstruction of the history in which our own provenance lies.80

The same caution is no doubt warranted when we examine socialist realist doctrine. If we feel a desire to link socialist realism to the problem of totalitarianism as its necessary consequence, we will have to do so on the basis of a far more substantial understanding of not only its

78 Simon Sparks, “Editor’s Introduction: Politica Ficta,” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Retreating the Politica , xiv–xxviii, xxii. 79 Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (New York: Verso, 2002), 154. Hitler himself offers a clear distinction between Nazism and Marxism in a speech in 1937: “The mainstay of the National Socialist program is to abolish the liberal concept of the individual and the Marxist concept of humanity and to replace them with the concept of Volk, rooted in soil and bound together in blood” (qtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “The Nazi Myth,” 311). Cai Yi’s Marxism fully embraced the concept of the “humanity” (renlei ) that Hitler here wishes to eliminate. 80 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “Nazi Myth,” 312.

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pre-history but the (post-)history of the mid-20th-century infatuation with a discourse of onto-typology that spanned the globe as well as the modern political spectrum. I have argued that the logic of the type has historically manifested itself in the West precisely in relation to what it conceived of (and viscerally feared) as an inassimilable exterior. That for Whitman this anxiety could take the form of a nightmarish “irreconcilable interior” reveals only another face of this logic, in Whitman’s unsettled awareness that the radical heterogeneity of the exterior may in fact haunt the interior, as well. My purpose here has been to unpack the concept of the type as it has been deployed habitually both in Chinese Marxist criticism and often dismissively in Western discussions of Chinese literature in which the concept appears to embody the signal failures of Chinese socialist realism as a literary practice. The type is rather more complex a concept than most mentions of it are willing to imagine. But my desire is less to complicate our understanding of it than to situate the specific Chinese Marxist appropriation of it more accurately in terms of the eideasthetic itinerary of modern literature around the globe since the 19th century. Indeed, readers need only peruse René Wellek’s magisterial eight-volume History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 to get a clear sense of how insistently the modern notion of the type asserts itself in criticism from the late-18th century on and, at the same, to grasp just how much earlier the concept flourished prior to Marx and Engels’ references to it. Furthermore, just as importantly for the task at hand, the type appears symptomatically throughout all the “world literatures” the polyglot Wellek is able to read. We can thus see how Lu Xun’s insertion of the concept into modern Chinese criticism in 1919, as well as his own fashioning of China’s first type in Ah Q installs a program for modern Chinese realist literature that will take several decades of criticism and literary production to develop fully.

CHAPTER FIVE

AESTHETICS AND DESIRE IN YANG MO’S SONG OF YOUTH The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Revolutionary Bildungsroman No doubt, one of the numerous difficulties that remain in our account of the socialist realist literary canon in China lies in our uneasy relationship to its theoretical mentor, dialectical materialism. A novel such as Song of Youth offers us an intelligent, passionate young woman whose love of country is as strong as her philosophical commitment to the truth embodied in the law of the negation of the negation. We have few problems accounting for the theme of nationalism in such novels, but tend to regard explicit mention of the latter theoretical convictions as at best ideological window dressing to fluff up the overall socialist character of the novel. At worst, references to dialectical materialism are unintended, chilling reminders of the totalitarian system of literary and artistic control to which the socialist realist novel pays morally (and aesthetically) defeated, craven homage. In any case, even those mildly sympathetic to Chinese leftist literary and artistic production have been taught to regard dialectical materialism as both politically suspect and philosophically empty.1 Thus, the theme of the nation in such novels is one we can easily embrace as a matter of real substance and urgency, while diamat itself seems best held at arm’s length, as ideological static

1 Nowhere is this claim more baldly stated than in Werner Meissner’s Philosophy and Politics in China: The Controversy over Dialectical Materialism in the 1930s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). Concerning Chinese discussions of the concepts in dialectical materialism and their correspondence to the political conflict between the CCP and the KMT, the author writes, “Because of these reciprocal functions, none of the philosophical concepts used can possess any intellectual content. Indeed, they are absolutely empty” (4, emphasis added). I challenge this claim in my article, “Negativity and Dialectical Materialism: Zhang Shiying’s Reading of Hegel’s Dialectical Logic.” Philosophy East and West, 57: 1, 63–82. Zhang’s study of Hegel’s Logic, written in the 1950s, makes a compelling case that the failure to account for the Hegelian dimensions of Chinese dialectical materialism (diamat) has severely limited our understanding of it. I discuss Zhang’s interest in the problem of negativity ( foudingxing 否定性) in Hegel and the importance he sees in it for grasping precisely what is dialectical in diamat.

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distracting us from our primary interest in socialist literary takes on the perennial theme enriching and empowering the Chinese nation. In what follows, I propose a reading of the novel Song of Youth that is based on the conjecture that the novel really does concern itself with what it claims are issues of philosophical and aesthetic substance. In other words, I ask the question of what we might learn from the novel if we take such queries as the following posed by the novel’s heroine, Lin Daojing 林道静 more seriously: “Xu Ning, do tell me: Are metaphysics and formal logic the same thing?” “Since the three principles of the dialectic can be applied in every situation, then how do we explain the negation of the negation?” “Why hasn’t the Soviet Union started a communist society yet? What will China be like under communism?” “. . . .”2

Yang Mo’s 杨末 narration lists these disconnected questions, suggesting the bustling intellectual activity of newly formed revolutionary synapses firing randomly with irrepressible enthusiasm. Having plowed fearlessly, if somewhat uncomprehendingly, through Engel’s Anti-Dühring and Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy, such questions swarm in her head, challenging her to transform dialectically her relation to the world, refashioning herself as she remoulds that world. The novel itself will offer no answer to these weighty matters, nor does it even attempt to address them on the sly in an effort to leaven in a little formal philosophical instruction alongside the main fare of revolutionary adventure. What the novel does do is offer a very compelling portrait of the powerful effects the desire to understand these questions can arouse in a young woman both frightened and disgusted with a world that at every turn seems hell-bent on her spiritual destruction. Such questions, and the conviction that they are answerable through a fully self-conscious engagement both with the world and with a series of theoretically advanced (anti-)3 philosophical works, can serve as the wellspring for what one might

2 Yang Mo, Song of Youth, trans. Nan Ying, (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), 121. Unless otherwise noted, the translations are my own. 3 Song of Youth fully embraces Marx’s well-known 10th thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm. Accessed June 24, 2004.

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term the revolutionary equivalent of religious faith.4 The reading of the novel I propose asks that we take the novel at its own word, taking seriously its claim to describe the experience of a commitment to the truth embodied in Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism. I hasten to add that the purpose of this is by no means to endorse the novel’s supposed ideological content, much less to participate in some broader effort to rehabilitate the socialist realist literary canon. My argument is less that such works have been misunderstood. The problem is much more that there appeared little in such works or in socialist realist aesthetics as a whole that required much understanding on our part.5 Precisely to the degree that dialectical materialism as the philosophical foundation of Chinese Marxist aesthetics was deemed wholly devoid of “genuine philosophical content”6 little need has been seen to read such novels on their own terms, that is, with reference to the philosophical aesthetic problems they explicitly claimed to engage. In practical terms, this would mean that we be careful in our reading of the following exchange in the novel to ask ourselves, for example, whose political slogans really are empty—the heroine Lin Daojing’s or her soon-to-be ex-lover Yu Yongze’s 余永泽?

4 Zhang Shiying’s discussion of Hegel’s logic deftly negotiates the problem abundantly evident in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, namely the relationship between the speculative dialectic and religious experience or mysticism: “Speculative truth, it may also be noted, means very much the same, in special connection with religious experience and doctrines, used to be called Mysticism . . . The reason-world (alles Vernünftige) may be equally styled mystical—not however because thought cannot reach and comprehend it, but merely because it lies beyond the compass of understanding” (G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975] 121). What Hegel refers to here as the speculative is precisely what Zhang develops in his own analysis as dialectical materialism’s true dialectic, at whose core lies negativity (Zhang Shiying 张世英 “Lun Heige’er de ‘Luojixue’ 论黑格尔的 ‘逻辑学’ ” [Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Press, 1959], 159). 5 I am speaking here only broadly of Chinese socialist realist literature as it has been traditionally dismissed. A far more nuanced picture has been offered by scholars such as Tang Xiaobing, Meng Yue, and Dai Jinhua, among numerous others. I am likewise strongly in agreement with the fundamental impulse and intuition Wang Ban articulates in his discussion of the film version of the novel, that we need a better account of socialist realism’s political/libidinal dynamics. See also his discussion of the novel in “Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism: The Song of Youth,” in The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, ed. Joshua S. Mostow et al., (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 471–475. 6 Meissner, Philosophy and Politics, v.

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chapter five “I think [the political situation] is beyond us, Daojing. What can palefaced scholars with bare hands accomplish?[. . .] Of course, it is easy enough to shout empty slogans![. . .]We have a home, we’d better keep out of harm’s way . . .” “How can you be such a fool?” She cut him short vehemently. “You’re the one shouting empty slogans! I never thought you would turn out to be such a coward!”7

The novel’s wager is obviously stacked against Yu Yongze, whose allegiance to Hu Shi is a clear measure of his ideological befuddlement/corruption. What we need to avoid is the literary critical equivalent of what I noted earlier in Hegel, namely the failure and limits of the faculty of abstract understanding: “Thought, as Understanding (Verstand ), sticks to the fixity of characters and their distinctness from one another: every such limited abstract it treats as having a subsistence and being of its own.”8 Thought requires this step but fails if it refuses to press on to the dialectical of first negative, and then positive (speculative) reason. In other words, if in our understanding of the novel we see in it only a series of positions existing in isolated and indifferent opposition to one another—Yu’s slogans/Lin’s slogans, KMT/CCP, fascism/communism, positivity/negativity, etc.—we have thus failed to regard the work dialectically, that is in the manner its mentor, dialectical materialism, asks of us. This limited position of the understanding is probably easiest for Westerners to adopt, simply because liberal democracies naturally regard both brutal, right-wing political repression (KMT) and excessive leftist enthusiasm for totalitarian ideology (CCP) with equal suspicion. The novel calls upon us to identify Lin as occupying the position of the dialectic, what Hegel describes as the “indwelling tendency outwards by which the one-sidedness and limitation of the predicates of the understanding is seen in its true light. . . .”9 It is Yu Yongze who, the novel charges, fixes and freezes the dynamic, revolutionary flux of 1930s Chinese reality, attempting to arrest Lin’s desire (and the revolution) and the active principle of dialectical negativity she figuratively embodies. To read the novel from the limited vantage of Hegel’s understanding would ultimately be to read the novel from Yu Yongze’s perspective, surely not what Yang Mo intends. Proposing to read the novel according to the active, dialectical oppositions it describes, is not meant as an

7 8 9

Yang Mo, Song, 118. Hegel, Logic, 113. Hegel, Logic, 116.

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effort to salvage some measure of ideological legitimacy for Chinese Marxist-Leninism in the face of its presumed historical demise. Rather, it merely suggests the need to assess the intellectual resources that shape novels like Song of Youth. Reading the novel in light of some of the theoretical resources that informed the project of socialist realism may help us gain in much clearer understanding its limitations. What is perhaps most compelling about the novel is its engagement with aesthetics. Song of Youth is animated by the powerful conviction that the aesthetic must play a dominant role in the formation of effective political knowledge. It therefore shares with socialist realist philosophical aesthetics the belief that knowledge of the beautiful is crucial to the realization of a truly humanized political order. Knowledge of reality is derived from a kind of aesthetic reasoning, known in socialist realist aesthetics as “image thought” (xingxiang siwei ). In what follows, I will examine one crucial feature of the novel, namely its preoccupation with a political philosophy of aesthetics. The novel attests to the keen awareness of the political stakes of beauty in modern China, entwining two histories; one in which the (auto-)biographical Bildungsroman of the Chinese heroine serves as an allegory for the emergence of China as modern nation-state. On the other hand, the novel displays a marked cosmopolitan affiliation in which Lin Daojing’s ideological formation is more broadly an allegory for the emergence of a revolutionary transformation in the aesthetic relationship between the human being and the world. Like much of socialist realist artistic production, Song of Youth often wavers between these two registers, namely between the fate of the nation and the fate of the human condition, as such. In other words, one of the curious ambiguities of socialist realist novels such as Song of Youth is its desire to ground the project of national salvation not on the basis of national identity but upon a commitment to Marxist humanism. There are very clear dangers to both and I will not be arguing the novel successfully avoids either. Nonetheless, I do believe it well worthwhile to consider the negativity that marks the disjuncture between these two registers. My interest is in the way Song of Youth poses the tale of national salvation as a dialectical materialist critique of idealist aesthetics. Song of Youth takes place during the early 1930s, beginning with the Japanese occupation of Northeast China in 1931 and ending with the mass student-led demonstrations of 1935. The novel tells the story of Lin Daojing, a young, progressive Chinese intellectual who is gradually transformed into a revolutionary student leader in the struggle

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against the Nationalist government’s policy of appeasement toward Japanese imperialism. It is a Bildungsroman in the strongest sense, which figures Lin Daojing’s individual ideological development from wavering petit bourgeois intellectual to revolutionary heroine as an allegory for China’s emergence to active revolutionary consciousness as unified historical subject. What is unique about the novel is its effort to sustain an extended reflection on the relationship between aesthetics, desire and revolution. The novel’s opening gesture strikingly poses the problem of the nature of the beautiful and its relation to the human and history. We could say that the novel must begin with an initial act of abstract understanding (Hegel’s Verstand ), in which two philosophical conceptions of the beautiful are posited in (not yet dialectical) opposition to one another. The novel’s “we,” as dialectical materialists/revolutionaries/proletarians have their own beauty and they, as bourgeois, counter-revolutionaries have theirs. Lin’s dialectical progress requires that she first embrace the latter’s politically retrograde and essentially Kantian conception of the beautiful in order that she later come to realize its failures and embrace the revolutionary vision of beauty. I begin with an analysis of what amounts to, crucially, Lin Daojing’s first actual social exchange as narrated in the novel. This exchange between Lin and the porter who carries her luggage into Beidaihe 北 戴河 from the train station poses one of the central problems in the novel, namely the relation between aesthetic experience of the beautiful and the existential necessity for revolution. The brief conversation between Lin and her porter provides an initial presentation of the much vaster problem of China as a modern nation-state in emergence, divided socio-economically by class and politically by party, since the 1927 split between the KMT and the CCP. China’s political division leaves it vulnerable to the Japanese invasion of Northeast China, an event that takes place almost immediately after Lin arrives in Beidaihe in search of her cousin Zhang Wenqing 张文清. The threat represented by Japan presents the immediate imperative that the Chinese nationstate posit itself as a unified subject on the stage of history. As the novel opens, Lin Daojing, having fled her corrupt, semi-feudal family, has just arrived by train from Beijing at Beidaihe, a resort town on the Yellow Sea. She is immediately placed in a relation to the beautiful, and in the same stroke the novel presents that aesthetic relation as a problem of sociality. Walking into town with her porter along the road, the two turn a corner, come to the top of a hill and suddenly the ocean looms

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into view. “When between the deep blue sky and the deep green of the open country suddenly emerged the boundless ocean, the female student’s sluggish steps came to a halt.”10 She is overwhelmed with the beauty of the ocean, framed as it is by the land and sky, and remains glued to the ground and deaf to her porter’s request that they proceed. What I would like to emphasize in my reading of this passage, not two pages into the novel, are several elements of Kant’s reading of the beautiful in the Critique of Judgement. These moments emerge here in succession, though they do not go unchallenged by the author.11 Yang Mo’s description of Daojing’s rapture grasps what is essentially Kantian (that is, from a diamat point of view) in the event and in so doing poses the novel’s initial ideological problem of an idealistic relation to the beautiful. Daojing’s first glimpse of the sea is one structured by a formal linearity—the sky, the open country, and the expanse of the sea receding deep into the horizon. It is not the sea, as such, in isolation, but rather its framing.12 In more Marxist terms, the emphasis is on the form, rather than the content of the image. Daojing’s relation to the object itself is depicted as absent of any interest. The beautiful according to Kant, is the experience of an object, the actual existence of which never enters into our aesthetic experience.13 10 Yang Mo, Qingchun zhige 青春之歌 (Song of Youth) (Beijing: Beijing October Literary Press, 1991), 4. 11 The aesthetic position of Daojing presented here in the novel is very much akin to that proposed by Cai Yuanpei, twenty years earlier in his essay “Replace Religion with Aesthetic Education.” Kant, who is mentioned very early in the novel, is admired by Daojing’s morally dissolute, opportunistic father, Lin Botang 林伯唐. Lin Botang enrolls in Imperial University, which will later become Peking University and becomes an “educationalist.” In 1916, the neo-Kantian Cai Yuanpei became Chancellor of Peking University. The connection the novel suggests between Lin Botang and Kant, underscores the novel’s interest in leveling a critique of idealist aesthetics. For a discussion of Cai Yuanpei, see Nie Zhebin 聂振斌, Cai Yuanpei ji qi meixue sixiang 蔡元培及其 美学思想 (Tianjin: Renmin chubanshe, 1984), 192. See also, William J. Duiker, Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei, Educator of Modern China (University Park PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 1977). 12 Kant’s third moment of the beautiful: “Beauty is the form of finality in an object, so far as perceived in it apart from the representation of an end” (Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991] 80). For Kant, subjective finality means that the understanding and imagination have combined to produce a form to which the mind can then proceed to attach an objective, theoretical concept—the ocean. Aesthetic judgement is possible only in the absence of the application of such a concept. 13 “All one wants to know is whether the mere representation of the object is to my liking, no matter how indifferent I may be to the real existence of the object of

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The porter, having grown impatient with Daojing, who is so deeply absorbed in the vision before her that she can barely hear his entreaty that they proceed, finds her behavior incomprehensible and is finally compelled to ask what it was she was looking at. “I was looking at the sea. It is so lovely!” The female student said turning to look at him, “How fortunate you are to live here, this place is so beautiful!” “What is so good about it? If we catch no fish, we have nothing to eat. We really do not experience it as being beautiful or not . . .” (我们可 没觉出来美不美。。。。) 14

The porter’s relation to the sea is governed entirely by practical interest.15 For the porter and the community he alludes to with the “we,” the sea is a place where vital human needs are to be met. It does not offer itself to him and his kind for aesthetic reflection. The porter fails utterly to provide Daojing with what Kant requires, namely universal agreement on the beautiful. His relation to the real differs from Daojing’s. What is for her in effect merely a canvas composed of formal beauty, a canvas from which she is decisively removed in her rapt aesthetic contemplation, is reality itself for the porter/fisherman. One of the central preoccupations of the novel is precisely how to understand dialectically this relation between Daojing and the canvas. In other words, in superseding her initial (Kantian, bourgeois) relation to the beautiful, she must preserve her concern for the beautiful, while in the same stroke negating her purely formal relation to it. For the limited, private, isolating beauty of the canvas to become true beauty, Daojing must in effect become a part of the canvas, such that it ceases to exist for her as such. Not four pages into the novel, it is already clear that it will not be a question of the porter’s lacking the capacity for aesthetic experience, but rather his unstated awareness that real beauty

this representation. It is quite plain that in order to say that the object is beautiful, and to show that I have taste, everything turns on the meaning which I can give to this representation, and not on any factor which makes me dependent on the real existence of the object” (Kant, Judgement, 43). 14 Yang, Qingchun, 5. 15 In his discussion of the sublime (whose evocation in the novel I examine below), Kant makes the point that just as with the experience of the beautiful, the experience of the sublime does not take the actual existence of the object that provokes it into consideration: “As to the prospect of the ocean,” should we view it from the perspective of our knowledge of it as a “spacious realm of aquatic creatures,” we cannot experience the sublime (Kant, Judgement, 122).

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lies elsewhere, at a source Lin must undertake arduous struggle both intellectually and physically, in order to discover. The educated Lin Daojing is figured in a class relation to the porter, and yet it is not the subaltern whose aesthetic education Song of Youth will narrate. Many years later, Yang Mo would write of her heroine that after expressing Daojing’s dreamy romanticism as a young petty bourgeois intellectual in her experience of Beidaihe, the author placed before her heroine a series of brutal events, which cause Daojing to gradually awaken and “return to reality.” In other words, Daojing’s Kantian relation to beauty, figures her detachment from reality. Where beauty exists for her, it is in nature and its forms—forms which for her, have no intelligible purpose. Her sense of beauty is unconditioned by a practical relation to the world around her, and she experiences beauty in reflective detachment from it. Her experience of the beautiful leaves her vacant (chichide, 痴痴的), deaf and dumb to the world around her. The porter has reached the bottom of the hill atop which Daojing remains as if bolted to the ground. The narration continues: When he no longer saw a trace of his employer, only then did he turn around, look up at the female student at the top of the hill and call out to her. The female student was still vacantly gazing at the sea below the precipice, gazing at a lonely white sail on the sea, as if she could hear nothing. 16

Suddenly, the visual orientation is shifted from Daojing’s ocean, framed by land and sky, to the perspective of the porter. In other words, we see the image of Daojing lost in aesthetic contemplation, standing on what has tellingly, in the short space of three lines, become a precipice ( ya, 崖).17 Further, in her visual rapture—what Kant describes as the play of the faculties of the imagination and the understanding—she is deaf to his communication. Yang Mo goes so far as to describe the manner

16 The English completely omits the underlined portion of the text. Not only is the class relation elided in the English, (for “female student,” (nü xuesheng 女学生) the translation has “she,” nor does it mention employer, guzhu 雇主), but also the English simply has her looking at a “lonely white sail, in the distance,” rather than framing the form of the distant sail against the background of the sea, thus glossing over the arrangement of the forms that activate the play of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination, according to Kant (Yang, Song, 4–5. I have modified the translation). 17 The image of her is reminiscent of the Caspar David Friedrich painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog which adorns the cover of Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic, and that figures the sublime, the second element of Kantian aesthetics which will appear several pages later.

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of Daojing’s gaze at the ocean as covetous (tanlan, 贪婪). We, as readers, suddenly adopt the visual perspective of the porter and hence bear critical witness to Daojing’s private, Kantian rapture. Kant’s claim of disinterestedness becomes here a charge of pure selfishness. The view Daojing beholds interests her as an empty form—it has no content, and hence, even more importantly for the purposes of the novel, no history. The object of Daojing’s aesthetic reverie is thus severed from any social compact. In Song of Youth, beauty will have to acquire a content and a history—something much more akin to Hegel’s sensuous expression of the ideal. If the author Yang Mo sees the need to transcend this empty, formalistic reading of the beautiful, she nonetheless accepts the premise that the community will be formed in relation to the aesthetic. This very scene will be reproduced once again in the novel, at a critical juncture when Daojing will achieve another level of self-consciousness and recognize how this Kantian disinterested beauty effectively divorced her not only from China as such, but more crucially from the proletariat as well.18 Up until this point in the novel, our heroine has yet to acquire a name and is referred to as the female student. Kant’s contemporary and theoretical appropriator Friedrich Schiller writes that the beginning of our liberation from nature and sensuousness occurs when we first take the world as an object of contemplation. Instead of merely apprehending it, we posit it as an object, and in so doing, our “personality” is born.19 Thus Daojing’s freedom from feudal relations

18 As she flees the landlord Song Guitang’s 宋贵堂 compound where she has worked undercover as private tutor, Daojing is overcome with the nighttime beauty of the surrounding landscape, which combines with her own powerful sense of sheer adventure. In one of the many clearly marked moments of burgeoning revolutionary self-consciousness, she catches herself just before repeating her earlier naïve effort at Beidaihe to forge a Kantian sensus communis, this time with her guide, the elderly peasant, Zheng Defu 郑德富: “It was on the tip of her tongue to call to Zheng Defu, ‘Isn’t it beautiful, uncle! And isn’t this life of ours splendid!’ But she was checked by the memory of the time when she had fled Beidaihe three years before. Then identical sensations had overpowered her at her first sight of the sea, making her exclaim to the porter, ‘Oh, look! Isn’t it lovely!’ His reply had been significant, ‘What’s lovely about it. If we catch no fish and have nothing to eat, scenery doesn’t count for much.’ So thinking, she looked at the ragged old farm hand who was plodding by her side. ‘A typical petty-bourgeois reaction!’ she scolded herself. ‘Will you ever get rid of these romantic notions and become as sane as the workers and peasants.’ ”(Yang, Song, 345). 19 Schiller also describes this moment of contemplation of the beautiful as the first “free relation between man and the universe” (Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, trans. Reginald Snell, [New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 1965] 119).

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takes its first halting steps in this forging of an initial relation to the beautiful. Daojing has another encounter with the sea at Beidaihe, this time near-tragic and in which the sublime is figured.20 The experience of the sublime is suggested when Daojing, upon overhearing Beidaihe school master Yu Jingtang’s 余敬唐 scheme to offer her as a concubine to Magistrate Bao, despairs of ever escaping the world’s torments and decides to hurl herself into the ocean one stormy night. The scene of her despair has an added element of horror, as a lightening flash illuminates the dark room outside her own where a coffin sits: Daojing’s head was heavy and she was too dizzy to think coherently. A flash of lightning lit up the black gleaming coffin, her heart missed a beat and then began to pound wildly. “Mother! Save your child! . . .” Weeping, she collapsed by the coffin and lay there for a long time without a sound. When she recovered, a fearful idea made her heart contract and then beat violently. . . . She jumped up and rushed out. Through the storm and darkness she ran straight from the temple to the shore. The inky, surging waves were a terrifying sight, but less to be dreaded than the wicked world of men. She ran to the edge of the water, to throw herself into the roaring, leaping waves. [Chapter Four concludes here, and the following one opens with:] The night was black. The sea was breaking angrily on the rocks (yanshi, 岩石) with a fearful, dismal roar.21

20 Ban Wang offers an incisive and wide-ranging analysis of the problem of the sublime in 20th-century China in his book The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). He provides an excellent discussion of Cui Wei’s film version of the novel. His analysis highlights the problem of revolutionary activism and libininal energy in the film and thus focuses on the ambiguous nature of desire. What is especially valuable about his reading is his effort to account for the film’s formidable capacity to draw in its audience, despite its overtly repressive sexual morality. As Wang clearly shows, the absence of sex in the film hardly deprives the film of any of its “libidinal intensity.” As I will argue, this is even more the case with the novel, which does in fact allow Lin to consummate her own sexual desire as she responds to the revolutionary Jiang Hua’s 江华 consuming desire for her. 21 For “fearful” the original has jingxin dongpo 惊心动魄, or “soul-stirring,” which in Kantian terms suggests a relation to the noumenal. The experience of the sublime is activated by what Kant terms the “play” between the faculty of imagination and reason. Reason itself is tied to the noumenal, or the supersensible. As it represents that element of our nature that is not governed by mechanical causality, it is the realm of freedom.

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If this passage is evocative of the sublime, it is with two important qualifications, both of which indicate the necessarily critical approach Yang Mo must take to it because the novel as a whole will serve as a sublation (Aufhebung), or negation-with-preservation of the idealist aesthetics pinned to Kant. First, the sublime as a form of aesthetic judgement is a subjective event and is not the ascription of some quality to an object, for example, “the raging seas,” though the latter may provoke the judgement. Perhaps more important for the purposes of this socialist realism novel is the fact that Kant’s sublime cannot be experienced unless an initial experience of terror is combined with a clear sense of our own personal security.22 In Lin’s case, it is precisely her own annihilation that is sought in her confrontation with the dark, storm-swept seas. And yet, her attempted suicide is an act of free will, through which she attempts to end her bondage to patriarchal, feudal oppression. Yang Mo clearly does not want her readers to leave this scene, so early in the novel, convinced of the truth of Kant’s (suicidal) doctrine of the sublime and freedom. To the contrary, idealist aesthetics must be shown up for its ultimate failure to grasp the realm of human freedom, which only a dialectical labor of the negative can hope to truly realize. The sublime must be preserved, however, though it must take up residence in Lin’s relation to the revolution as the project of human liberation. Ero(poli)tics of the Text Lin’s effort to extinguish her life is aborted at the last moment by the intervention of Yu Yongze. In gratitude for his rescue and the protection he provides from the lascivious designs of his uncle Yu Jingtang, Lin begins to form the first of her erotic attachments to men. These relationships in the novel follow a clear dialectical trajectory. The sexually consummated affair with Yu Yongze the reactionary is effectively negated by her chaste love for the revolutionary Lu Jiachuan 卢嘉川, whose role in the erotic dialectic’s unfolding requires that he be “killed

22 “The astonishment amounting almost to terror, the awe and thrill of devout feeling, that takes hold of one when gazing upon the prospect of mountains ascending to heaven, deep ravines and torrents raging there, deep shadowed solitudes that invite to brooding melancholy, and the like-all this, when we are assured of our own safety, is not actual fear” (Kant, Judgement, 120–121, italics mine).

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off ” (as Meng Yue aptly puts it).23 Finally, the devout, sublime (Meng Yue’s term) purity of Lin’s love for the martyred Lu finds concrete, corporeal expression in her sexual affair with the revolutionary colleague and lover Jiang Hua.24 As will later become apparent, all significant moments in Lin Daojing’s development are tied directly to her own aesthetic/cognitive experience of other characters’ self-narration. Further, all kinds of different texts, especially ones with cognitively rich images (xingxiang) are vital to Lin’s emerging understanding of her world. As is often pointed out, such male figures as Lu Jiachuan play decisive roles in helping Lin embark on the road to revolution. Nonetheless, it is the oral, auto-narration of exclusively female figures that most fully enable Lin’s ideological formation.25 Both their personal oral accounts as well as the numerous literary and theoretical texts Lin devours voraciously help to catalyze the powerful images she forms.26 The first part of Song of Youth is consistently pre-occupied with the ero(poli)tics of the text. The novel casts two initial rivals for Lin’s affections in plainly political terms—Yu Yongze, the handsome, idealist student turned reactionary disciple of Hu Shi, and Lu Jiachuan, the

23 Meng Yue points out that the sacrifice of Lu Jiachuan renders Lin’s relation to him sublime (Meng Yue, “Female Images and National Myth,” in Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism, ed. Tani Barlow [Durham: Duke University Press, 1993] 129). 24 The dialectic is likewise at work on the level of sexual ethics. What is also “killed off ” with Lu’s martyrdom is a (true, actual, as opposed to false, hypocritical) sense of neo-Confucian propriety (i.e. Lu Xun’s Soap) derived from feudal relations. Because of his refusal to act upon his attraction to Lin Daojing, Lu Jiachuan’s close friend Luo Dafang 罗大方 accuses him of being a puritan (qingjiaotu 清教徒). I strongly suspect this is a result of Yang Mo’s clear effort to distance Lu’s chaste relation to Lin from any taint of neo-Confucianism, which, at the time, was seen in uniformly negative terms. Jiang Hua presents a more full-blooded passion, appropriate to the emerging, historically advanced gender/sexual relations. “Daojing, I am not here today to talk about work. I wanted to ask—do you think we could be more than just comrades?”: “道静, 今天找你来, 不是谈工作的。我想来问问你—你 说 咱 俩 的 关 系, 可以 比同志的关系更进一步吗?” (Yang Mo, Qingchun, 558). The English translation turns its back on problem of nature of the comrade-as-lover relation, and simply has “Can we be more to each other than friends?” (Yang, Song, 560–561). This kind of erotic relation is dialectically opposed to the one Lin has with Yu Yongze. 25 Crucially, all our biographical knowledge of even the most important male figures in Lin’s life, such as Lu Jiachuan and Jiang Hua, is provided extradiegetically to the reader by the narrator. 26 After her second release from prison, Lin develops the habit of two hours of study of Marxist texts each morning. I take up the problem of these images and their role in the final section.

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communist organizer turned revolutionary martyr. Both of these figures are in turn linked to Daojing via a series of literary and theoretical texts. The complex web woven by her various textual engagements produces specific conjunctures of theory, aesthetics, and desire. Each of these conjunctures in turn combine to map out the possibilities of human freedom. It is no doubt the case that the novel’s high investment in the powerful emancipatory affects of aesthetics and desire does not finally pay off in terms of fully realizing the revolutionary potential the novel will ascribe to them.27 Furthermore, Meng Yue is right to complain that the novel tends to foreclose upon a “continuation of a modern tradition of women’s writing.” For Meng Yue, the institutionalization of socialist literature to which Yang Mo’s novel contributed excluded the possibility of a “gendered eye” bearing witness to the nation/Party. In Meng’s incisive analysis, Lin’s very mobility in the text, by means of which she negotiates her way through, over or around the numerous men in her life does not, in the end, find a way clear to a space for women’s writing. What I would like to draw attention to is the way Song of Youth accomplishes the exclusion of a certain kind of gendered (Chinese female) pen precisely through, ironically, the sublation of modern Chinese literature itself. Meng Yue’s conclusion is fundamentally correct but neglects the consciously elaborate sublation of “modern writing,” in both its colonial and gendered dimensions. A brief passage early in the novel should help illustrate what is argued with increasing vehemence as the novel/Lin progresses—namely, the failure of modern literature as a part of the more general failure of modern (that is, pre-diamat sponsored) aesthetics. Having only just barely escaped the lecherous clutches of a wealthy Japanese, who had placed an advertisement in a Beijing newspaper seeking the services of a “governess,” Daojing goes to visit Yu Yongze, who attempts to dissuade her from galloping about idealistically in the world like an “unruly colt”:28 “Ideals are ideals, facts are facts. I trust it won’t be long before you run yourself ragged.”

I take this problem up in my conclusion. Nan jiayu de xiaoma, 难驾驭的小马. Yu’s metaphor is ultimately less a description of her spirited efforts to struggle against the prevailing oppressive winds of society than a telling recognition of his own failure to tame her. 27 28

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It struck Daojing, as she stared at his lean dark face and small bright eyes, that Yongze was neither handsome nor cultivated. In any case, this was strange advice to be giving her! More distressed than ever, she watched him coldly and without a word. “Darling!” After a moment’s silence, he approached and took her in his arms, murmuring softly, “Listen, Daojing! come and live with me! This is the tenth time I have asked you. . . . Think how happy we can be here! I shall come back from lectures to a delicious meal prepared with your own hands. I shall be able to teach you more about the literature you love. If you like, I can help you with any poems you write.”29

This scene is especially telling since it is the first of three instances in the novel that Lin’s aspirations as a female writer are mentioned. Lin writes three poems in the novel. The first is one she copies into the sand at Beidaihe just prior to her near-suicide, written by the Tang poet Lu Zhaolin 卢照邻 (635?–689?).30 The second two are poems she writes as lyric love letters to the jailed Lu Jiachuan, who is never able to read them. Especially the first of these latter two poems would seem at first glance to qualify Meng Yue’s overall judgement on Yang Mo’s novel as a whole that it never effectively takes up a specifically gendered reflection on female desire. The poem is an ardent avowal of Lin’s deep love for Lu, while the second poem much more fully blends her devotion to him as a part of the cause they share. What is crucial to recognize is that the novel very consciously seeks to explore the possibilities of aesthetic affect, quite apart from the May Fourth or Republican literary traditions. Lin does in these two instances take pen to paper to express her passion lyrically in verse. What remains true of Meng Yue’s claims, however, is that the novel does foreswear any role in depicting “the conflict between a single woman’s fortune and the fate of the whole nation or whole civilization.”31 While fundamentally true, this conclusion is all the more curious given the novel’s overt content, i.e., a young woman’s struggle in a period of grave national crisis. I would like to examine briefly how and why this is the case. The early chapters of the novel brilliantly evoke the increasingly stifling domesticity Yu Yongze struggles to impose upon Lin. As the

29 The Chinese marks in a more emphatic manner Yu’s offer to edit/improve her literary output (我来替你修改). It thus serves to underscore his claim to literary authority (Yang, Song, 78). 30 Lu Zhaolin’s name is a partial homophone for “Lu ( Jiachuan) seeks Lin (Daojing).” 31 Meng Yue, “Female Images,” 127.

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quoted passage above clearly indicates, the fate of Lin as a modern Chinese woman writer is explicitly linked to her domestic submission to Hu Shi-ist modern sinological reconstruction of China’s national heritage. It is much easier to understand this relationship between the modern sinological reconstruction of the Chinese literary past and the role of a modern female writer, when we consider the precise trajectory of Lin’s textual engagements as they unfold in part one of the novel. There is a volatile oscillation between Western/Chinese, Ancient/ Modern, and finally Modern National/Revolutionary Cosmopolitan literary and theoretical works that combines to produce the textual web of transformative identifications for Lin Daojing. It is Yu’s formidable grasp of world literature that Lin will at first find so attractive in him as they sit on the shores of Beidaihe discussing “art, life and society.” Yu comes to occupy the national subject position of emerging (post-) colonial literary authority, whose role is above all to establish a commensurability between the multiplicity of now systematically unified and exemplary world/national literatures at large and a modern Chinese literature at home. Further, Yu’s seductive/manipulative literary authority is invoked in the novel to mark both its duplicity and dangers for Lin, as well as to mark the profound limitations of Yu’s grasp of the actual meaning of aesthetic experience. Tied directly to this failure on his part is his love for Daojing. In other words, erotics and textuality are both governed by a common principle of desire, and yet Yu Yongze cannot but perceive them in isolation from one another. Lin Daojing, on the other hand resists this closure, sensing a profound connection between her emerging erotic desire for Lu Jiachuan, and her desire to overcome her contemplative relation to the world through the practical/theoretical effort to bring herself to bear upon the world through revolutionary action. She will seek to combine a cognitive/theoretical grasp of the world with a sensuous (aesthetic) involvement within it. If this means that the true nature of erotic love is contested in the novel, it has little to do with whatever preconceived notion we might have of Maoist dicta concerning class love.32 Yu falls completely in love with Lin Daojing, and yet his infatuation with her

32 Again, Ban Wang’s insights about the film adaptation of the novel are of great value since they are premised on the conviction of the polymorphous nature of desire. This helps us account for Lin’s intense antipathy toward Yu’s understanding of desire as the forging of a domestic heterosexual union. Perhaps most importantly, Wang sees clearly just how thoroughly charged with desire communist politics could be.

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is very clearly marked in the narration as of a fundamentally different order than her own experience of erotic connection to Lu Jiachuan and later, Jiang Hua. Yu desires her with very real passion, but because he fundamentally misconstrues the nature of desire, Lin Daojing must gradually take on all the trappings of his material possession.33 Throughout the novel, Lin becomes the repeated object of reactionary lust, and Yu effectively conceals his own through calculated references to Western literature in his chats with Lin. “He spoke of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Hugo’s Les Misérables, La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas fils, and the poetry of Heine and Byron; then of the Chinese writers like Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹, Du Fu 杜甫, and Lu Xun.”34 The irony of Yu’s efforts to tease loose Lin Daojing’s passion through literary seduction is nowhere more tellingly revealed than in the novel’s second scene of the ero(poli)tics of reading, this time with Lu Jiachuan.35 Figuring Lu and 33 After announcing her intention to attend the March Eighteenth demonstration at Beida, Yu Yongze reacts with violent assertion of modern, patriarchal domestic authority: “I won’t allow it!” Yongze sat up abruptly. The despair in his beady eyes made him look like a wild beast at bay. “You are mine! Your life and mine are joined together. We shall live and die together—no force on earth can part us! (我们不能分裂!) No, nothing can part us . . . On no account must you join that parade tomorrow! Understand? This is the first time I’ve interfered with your actions, but this I must interfere.” Yongze’s beastial transformation is placed in direct relation to his conception of the modern Chinese conjugal relation, with its subtle invocation of the Western/ Christian wedding vow (“What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” The Chinese version reads: 所以神所配合的, 人不可分开 。www .biblekeeper.com/chinese-union-gb/matthew_19.html. Accessed May 28, 2004). It is probably not going too far to suggest that Yu is here invoking an alien, historically/ politically retrograde metaphysics as the ground of his unity with Lin. 34 Cao Xueqin, as author of the magnificent 18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber and the 8th century Tang dynasty poet Du Fu are snuggly sandwiched in this list between the modern European literary titans and Lu Xun, the early 20th century writer of decidedly cosmopolitan literary sensibilities. One clearly senses Cao and Du Fu find mention in this pantheon on the basis of very modern literary considerations—Cao Xueqin as the great proto-realist critic of the inhuman ravages of feudal ethics and Du Fu as poet-nationalist. 35 One anonymous reviewer understandably found this claim of literary seduction perhaps unduly harsh. I should have added that the narration makes repeated references to Yu’s calculated efforts to seduce her through literature. Yu’s references to literature are repeatedly described as tactical deployments to conceal his true feelings for her. He recites Heine’s poem in order to “seize on a new subject to cover his confusion” (Yang, Song, 42). “He had held [his feelings] in check and talked only of subjects likely to please Daojing.” “[S]hrewdness and caution warned him that to reveal his feelings too soon was dangerous” (Yang, Song, 45, I have modified the translation). My point is simply that the way textual/literary aesthetics mediates Yu’s erotic relationship to Daojing stands in clear contrast to the way it does in her relation to Lu Jiachuan. It is almost as if Yu senses intuitively that to reveal himself fully (as he later will) would

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Yu too woodenly (merely reactionary versus revolutionary) in opposition to one another as objects of Lin’s desire would fail to account for what takes place in the unleashing of Lin’s desire in this second instance. With Lu Jiachuan, Lin’s desire escapes the bo(u)nds of the purely literary scope Yu has attempted to forge for her—the bounds that close in upon her as the walls of the bourgeois, private, domestic sphere and the borders of modern Chinese (national) (woman’s) literature. Again, both these spaces are laid out in advance by Yu Yongze for Lin in a manner the narration suggests is as effectively lethal to her emerging identity as female revolutionary activist as a spiritual lobotomy. The real irony lies in Yu Yongze’s symptomatic mis-reading of her transformation that takes place through internalizing revolutionary theory and what the novel views as the truly cosmopolitan and revolutionary literature of the Soviet Union.36 Yu rails against the textual seduction of his lover at the hands of her Marxist friends, especially Lu Jiachuan, who makes periodic visits to Lin. His very presence flagrantly displays the other source of Lin’s budding ardor, namely revolutionary desire, in a manner that could not be more humiliating for Yu than if he had been forced to watch his Lin make love to Lu Jiachuan. Indeed, there is something almost sadistically exhibitionistic about Lu’s efforts to engage Lin in dialogue about her revolutionary aspirations, as Yu stands fuming nearby, waiting for his lunch to be served.

destroy their relationship, which of course it does. Nonetheless, the reviewer’s doubts on this count point to an important aporia in the narrative, since it really would be too harsh to fault Yu for falling in love with Daojing. He must genuinely love and desire her and yet do so in a way that will finally clash with her own relationship to desire. On a related note, Cui Wei’s film direction of the Beidaihe portion of the novel raises none of the subtle hints of Yu’s calculation that Yang Mo’s narration includes. Yu Shizhi’s 于是之 film portrayal of Yu Yongze is brilliant precisely for capturing both the depth of Yongze’s love for Lin as well as what becomes its catastrophically possessive nature. 36 By cosmopolitan here, I mean simply literature that seeks to displace the modern individual female writer/national civilization relation with what Song of Youth very clearly identifies with, namely a human/global proletarian relation. For Lin, the personal stakes of the entire revolutionary saga are political as well. What is at stake is always spiritual life and death. “What kind of life is that! It’s a living death! (Lit. A spiritless, walking corpse.) (可是, 那叫什么生活! 没有灵魂的行尸走肉! ,” Yang Mo, Song, 42; Qingchun, 42). Lin has just quoted Gorky, “Our greatest, most glorious task in life is to be a man.” While somewhat awkward in the English, the Chinese clearly marks the human/global relation (在世界上 做一个人) (Yang Mo, Qingchun, 42). Lin’s Marxist humanist aspirations are placed in clear juxtaposition to the gendered Chinese position of patriarchal oppression.

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The relation between ideology and love must remain obscure for the politically regressive Yu. For Yu, Lin’s textual seduction must be the result in a simple cognitive error of seeing ideals where one must learn to resign oneself to see facts. “Ideals are ideals, and facts are facts” (76) “Reality is always reality (161).” Immediate reality, as Yu (fails to) understand(s) it, is necessarily bereft of that negativity which allows for reality’s transformation into something other than what it is. As Zhang Shiying explores at length in his study of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, it is abstract understanding that would see in immediate reality only itself and see in facts only facts. Hegel, in a manner fully endorsed by dialectical materialism, writes that to the contrary, “true Being is just the superseding of all that is immediate.”37 What is given by reality is always reality—to this Yu’s abstract understanding will always nod unwittingly in agreement. It is left to speculative dialectical thought to fully grasp in immediate reality also the very seeds of its dissolution and the historically and politically effected transition from this reality to that reality.38 The dialectic knows both the clear difference between this and that—a capacity granted it by the understanding—but it knows further the principle of negativity that mediates the transition between them. Chewing on a wotou 窝头 in one hand, Daojing, at the very least, comes to realize this much as she simultaneously devours A Short Course in Dialectics or Engel’s Anti-Dühring in her other.39 It is the desire Hegel, Logic, 164. “However, in terms of knowledge and grasping concrete truth, the abstract concept is always insufficient. The real world is an organic totality in which many aspects are mutually linked. It is a continuous, developing process. The dead, formal ‘abstract concept’ which separates by a gulf the ‘either this or that’ is powerless to grasp such a living content” (Zhang, “Luojixue,” 159). 39 “The corn bread was not very palatable; but she was so absorbed in her books that she often finished her meal without noticing it. After discovering the new “relish” of her books she was rarely parted from them (Yang, Song, 121).” Hegel links consumption of food and philosophical knowledge of the essential nothingness of immediate “sense-objects” in the Phenomenology of Spirit: In this respect we can tell those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-objects that they should go back to the most elementary school of wisdom, viz. the ancient Eleusinian mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, and that they have still to learn the secret meaning of eating bread and the drinking of wine. For he who is initiated into these Mysteries not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to despair of it; in part he brings about the nothingness of such things himself in his dealings with them, and in part he sees them reduce themselves to nothingness. Even animals are not shut out from this wisdom but, on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it; for they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, 37 38

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the consumption of such texts stokes that will assuredly bring down the domestic walls within which Yu seeks with increasing desperation to contain her (desire). Yu has learned from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina that “You can tell from a young woman’s eyes if she is in love (117).” Recalling this passage from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Yongze was suddenly seized by a foreboding. He stole uneasy glances at Daojing and, as soon as she went out to shop, took the chance to rummage through trunks, drawers, the bookcase, and even the waste-paper basket. He found nothing, however, except a few leftist books on the desk and by her pillow. Nervously rolling his eyes, he muttered to himself: “I’m sure of it—someone’s been seducing ( yinyou 引诱) her.”40

It is Yu of all people who is most fully aware of the seductive power of literary aesthetics, and who manipulates it at every turn in his pursuit of Lin Daojing. He just cannot quite make the connection between the “leftist books” (qingzuo shu 倾左书) he overlooks and the seduction he rightly concludes is underway. He cannot grasp that modern literature, like modern conjugal domesticity and the modern love it consummates institutionally, represent historical waypoints on an uncharted passage toward an ultimately radically different future for sexual relations. 41 Instead, Song of Youth is premised on a virulent disgust with the way the forces of political reaction embrace all three as terminal points of historical development. This explains why both Yu and Lin must break decisively with their former relation to modern (Western) literature, though each in very different ways, based on radically different answers to the very question that first bound them together on the shores of Beidaihe—namely what is the true nature of the relationship between art and social life. As we saw above, the Kantian articulation of beauty and the sublime must fail. Both the nation and the individual risk

they fall to without ceremony and eat them up (G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1977] 65). 40 Yang, Song, 117, emphasis added. 41 Any reading of the novel that imagines Daojing’s erotic desire guided solely by the decision of whether to marry a (future) KMT member or a CCP member, will fail to grasp the significance of the psychological tumult she experiences in her attraction to Lu Jiachuan. Lin may love Lu Jiachuan, but she most assuredly does not wish to be his wife, as both the two poems she writes to him make clear. The standard objections to Maoist theories of class love are certainly valid in their recital of some of the disastrous consequences this concept, in its most essentialist form, may have taken in post-liberation China. But, they nonetheless have little to say to the genuine desire Lin embodies to be done with “modern” marriage, even as that Western institution was just beginning to take hold in early 1930s China.

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annihilation should this reading of the aesthetic be embraced as an adequate account of the essential relation between art (aesthetic experience) and life (ethics, political practice). Below we will see how the Marxist-Hegelian image and the modern/Western history of aesthetics, will begin to supercede this Kantian formal beauty very early in the novel, even before Lin’s encounter with the sublime. Yu explicitly announces his move away from “pure literature” and his adoption of Hu Shi’s textual research (kaoju 考据) and the larger project of “consolidating [what it mistakes for] the national essence (zhengli guosui 整理国粋).” Lin Daojing is clearly situated in the narrative to struggle forward toward recognizing the national spirit in its most vital form and maintaining it clearly in her sights as a dynamic source of revolutionary identification. Yu, on the other hand believes Hu Shi’s textual research will provide access to the national essence. It is left to Lin Daojing to assess publically the failure of Yu’s project for “national salvation through study” as nothing more than a political expediency foisted by Yu’s reactionary elders to staunch the flow of young, intellectual disaffection away from the KMT. With Yu, the transformation of outward appearance is meant to mask the moribund philosophical and cultural core. As Daojing observes pointedly to the young communist and Beida classmate Luo Dafang at dinner with Yu Yongze, once the topic of conversation turns to the possible forms (xingshi 形式) “national salvation” can take, “[Yu’s] form is to change new foreign-style books for old Chinese style books (xianzhuang shu 线装书), to change a student’s uniform for a long gown.”42 The novel then relates Daojing’s recent frustration with his new, conservative dress. “According to [Yu], the processing of the national essence (zhengli guocui) and wearing of national costume were concrete expressions of patriotism.”43 In short, if the affective power of literature as Yu seeks to delimit it, is to find a place in modern China, it is only by leave of the national tradition, processed, organized, and assembled for the consolidation of the cultural authority of the modern Nationalist Chinese nation-state. Only as such does Yu allow Daojing to take up her pen as poet at home, both domestically and nationally, and as modern Chinese wife/writer to the native tradition, submitting her literary production to the traditional authority for patriarchal approval and correction. Yongze’s offer

42 43

Yang, Song, 96; Yang, Qingchun, 94. Yang, Qingchun, 94.

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to personally teach Daojing the literature she loves to read, explicitly figures China’s colonial relation to modern (Western) literature. Yet she can only take up this position of tutored subject as a Chinese woman writer, if she accepts that her knowledge (and production) of modern literature be mediated by the national literary tradition modern sinology (Yu) provides. This is another way of saying that Song of Youth’s heroine will ally herself with a radically different approach to what the novel takes to be the universal question of the relation between art and social life, as the particular question of the relation between modern literature and national salvation. The link between the force of desire unleashed by Lin’s acquisition of Marxist theoretical and aesthetic knowledge and her relationship to Lu Jiachuan remains obscure for Yu Yongze. Yu’s embrace of the Chinese national tradition is tied directly to his need to domesticate Lin Daojing. Modern literary aesthetic affect, as Yu calls upon Lin to embody/create it, must be figured in relation to—and contained by—national essence, delimiting the nature of what is Chinese and modern in literary sentiment. Lin’s theoretical development provides the pretext for laying out the stakes of gender, writing, and nationalism. The novel frames the issue of theoretical knowledge and ethics in terms of a connection between dialectics and life on the one hand and a corrupt, reactionary embrace of a moribund Chinese civilization on the other. Indeed, the essence of the Chinese past serves as one of the primary sites of ideological conflict between Lin and Yu in the domestic space they share with increasing friction, until that conflict can no longer be contained and she must leave.44 44 One anonymous reviewer pointed to the important intertextual connections with May Fourth literature and female writing. This point is very well taken, since Song of Youth clearly aligns itself with Lu Xun’s Nora problematic. As the reviewer aptly noted, Lin Daojing leaves home twice, once on page one of the novel, and then later when she breaks up with Yu Yongze. Indeed, while still at Beidaihe early on, Yu Yongze tells Lin that he finds her “even braver and more determined” than the heroines of “Ibsen’s A Doll House and Feng Yuanjun’s 冯沅君 Breaking Away 隔绝” (Yang Mo, Song, 43). As a whole, the novel is indeed aimed at what it perceives as the failings of Republican era discourse on what Yu Yongze identifies on the same page as the “struggle for . . . independence of women.” In the context of the novel, read as a whole, Republican China’s failures on this count are figured as Yu’s as well. Initially, he sees a problem, but fails fundamentally to grasp what is needed to address it. As such, it comes as very little surprise to the reader that Yu himself becomes a clear obstacle to Daojing’s independence. Precisely for this reason, the same reviewer’s further point that Lu Xun’s Regret for the Past (Shangshi 伤逝) shares vital intertextual links with Song

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Image, Knowledge, and Revolutionary Formation (Bildung) One of the most powerful forces to animate Daojing’s dialectical engagement with the world is her aesthetic experience of what in post-liberation philosophical aesthetics was termed the image (xingxiang). Song of Youth is a good example of a Chinese socialist novel that attempts to put into literary practice a notion of materialist aesthetics organized around the principle of the image (xingxiang). In doing so, Song of Youth embraces a key element of Chinese Marxist philosophical aesthetics from the 1950s, underscoring the novel’s more generalized critique of idealist aesthetics. Yang Mo not only makes frequent references to images as they appear to Lin Daojing, she goes to considerable lengths in exploring the ways certain dialectically formed images are replete with powerfully transformative cognitive and aesthetic dimensions. At certain decisive moments in the novel, Lin effectively engages in “image thought” (xingxiang siwei), a concept derived from Cai Yi’s Marxist appropriation of the Hegelian image via a number of Russian sources.45 It is important to keep in mind that the novel’s commitment to this notion of the image partook of the larger project of consolidating the essentially organic philosophical aesthetics of post-liberation China.46 In the conclusion, I will return to the consequences of this for understanding Song of Youth’s relation to literature as an autonomous field of artistic endeavor.

of Youth is all the more interesting and deserves more detailed, separate treatment. Suffice it provisionally to say that the Yu/Lin relationship has strong parallels with the Juansheng 涓生/Zijun 子君 relationship in Regret for the Past. Both texts figure males, whose self-avowed commitments to women’s independence is starkly at odds with their subsequent reduction of their female partners to domestic servants. Symptomatically, Juansheng compulsively imagines Zijun’s death and she ends up circuited back to her natal home where she (mysteriously) dies. Lin Daojing is quick to realize the very similar (spiritually) lethal domestic fate Yu has in store for her and departs. 45 As I noted earlier, The image itself has a long and complex genealogy in 20th century China, deriving ultimately from Hegel via 19th- and 20th-century Russian and Soviet thinkers, especially Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848) and Georg Plekanov (1856–1918). 46 In their polemic against Hegel’s pervasive influence in Russian and early Soviet aesthetic criticism, the Russian Formalists of the 1920s attacked the organicist conviction that the unity of art in all of its various forms was underwritten by the concept of the artistic image. It was precisely this organic aesthetics of the 19th century Russian Vissarion Belinsky that exerted so powerful an impact on the formation of Chinese socialist realist aesthetic theory in the late 1940s and 1950s. For a comprehensive discussion of organic aesthetics, see Victor Terras, Belinsky and Russian Literary Criticism: The Heritage of Organic Aesthetics (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1974).

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The image (xingxiang) would dominate many discussions of Chinese aesthetics from the late 1930s especially after the initial publication of Cai Yi’s Xin yishulun in 1942. This concept of the image was meant to constitute organically the field of art and aesthetics as a totality.47 Further, the image has a very important cognitive status, which places it squarely within the problem of ideology and representation. The image will provide the viewer, and in this case one must say the listener and the reader as well, with knowledge of the historical development of the social formation. We might rather simply say the perceiver, since the image will not be linked purely to one sense—indeed the image will transcend the individual senses. For this reason, the notion of the image will likewise transcend the various, material spheres of aesthetic production, namely sculpture, architecture, music, painting, poetry, etc. In short, in this aesthetics all artistic creation is oriented toward the fashioning of the image. Cai Yi writes, Although with the different kinds of art, the image-nature (xingxiang xing, 形象性) [of each] has different characteristics, for example, the visuality of painting and the sculptural image, and the imaginative nature of musical and literary images—nonetheless, no matter what the art form, none can do without a concrete, sensuous image-ness.48

But, it is one thing to subsume the visual arts, namely architecture, painting and sculpture under the concept of the image. This concept of the image is, however, not one limited to those art forms for which the eye is the primary organ of perception. This notion of the image is further decisively linked to poetry—in other words, the image is the essence of all the arts, whether figurative or discursive. Undoubtedly,

47 Yang Mo’s diaries include a quote from Diderot who began to be translated into Chinese in the 1950s (Yang Mo, Zibai—wode riji (Confessions—My Diary) [Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1985] 224). It is not surprising that Chinese took an interest in Denis Diderot whose aesthetics shares much with Hegel’s. Diderot sums up very succinctly the relation between the image and the unity of the arts. “To compare the beauties of one poet with those of another is something that has been done a thousand times. But to bring together all the beauties common to poetry, to painting, and to music; to show the analogies between them; to demonstrate how the poet, the painter, and the musician render the same image; to seize the fugitive emblems of their expressions; to determine whether there may not be some similarity between those various emblems, etc.—that is what now remains to be done and what I advise you [the Abbé Batteux] to add to your The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle” (Denis Diderot, Selected Writings, ed. Lester G. Crocker [New York: Macmillan, 1966], 38). 48 Meixue yuanli tigang 美学原理提纲 (Outline of Aesthetic Principles), Cai Yi et al., eds., (Guangxi: People’s Publishing House, 1983) 52.

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the term image possesses in Chinese all of the visual connotations that image has in English. And yet, the image is what carries over from the purely physical sense of visuality, with the eye as the organ of aesthetic perception, to what in Hegel and Diderot is a more spiritualized and inward notion of visuality, the eye of the imagination. How then to relate the image to poetry, the art form whose medium of sensuous expression is language, rather than paint or stone? For Hegel in Lectures on Fine Art, it is a kind of “spiritual vision” that overcomes the successive nature of language, enabling the mind to form an aesthetic image.49 In other words, the problem of the image is that it requires a kind of simultaneity that narrative, because of the successive nature of language, necessarily lacks. All narrative must conclude by pulling all the strands of the narrative together and setting them forth in a single image. It is the inwardness of spirit that enables us to “extinguish” the succession of narrative.50 This activity of the spirit is exactly what happens with considerable frequency for Lin Daojing. In the novel, such images are formed continuously during the narrative. In an early flashback in the story, Daojing recalls finally learning the truth about her mother from the sympathetic and loving servant who relates to Daojing her birth-mother’s peasant origins, how her mother was brutally raped by Lin Daojing’s wealthy 49 Hegel writes, “On the other hand, the different traits which poetry introduces in order to make perceptible to us the concrete content of the subject in hand, do not fall together, as they do in painting, into one and the same whole which completely confronts us with all its details simultaneously; on the contrary, they occur separately because the manifold content of the idea can be expressed only in succession. . . . But this is a defect only from the sensuous point of view, one which the spirit can always rectify. Even where speech is concerned to evoke some concrete vision, it does not appeal to the sensuous perception of a present external object but always to the inner life, to spiritual vision, and consequently even if the individual traits only follow one another they are transferred to the element of the inwardly harmonious spirit which can extinguish a succession, pull together a varied series into one image and keep this image firmly in mind and enjoy” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. Knox [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 961, italics in original). 50 Diderot speaks precisely to this point. In a “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb,” he writes, “What is this spirit? I myself have sometimes felt its presence; but I know no more of it than that it is the cause whereby things can be spoken and represented simultaneously, so that the mind apprehends them, the soul is moved by them, the imagination sees them, and the ear hears them all at one and the same time: so that the language used is no longer merely a succession of linked and energetic terms expressing the poet’s thought with power and nobility, but also a tissue of hieroglyphics, all woven inextricably together, that make it visible” (Diderot, Selected Writings, 38). For Diderot, the mind, the soul, the imagination, and the ear grasp the image all at once, paradoxically, even sound, whose form, like language is successive.

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landlord father, and how her mother was turned out of the house once Daojing was a year old. The mother, insane with grief, wails for days outside the walls of the Lin household, before she is tied up driven to the rural village, from whence she was first taken by Daojing’s father, and where she finally leaps into a river ending her life. Here, I quote: Suddenly, in [ Daojing’s] mind’s eye, the wrinkled old servant was transformed into a comely, distraught young woman with hair disheveled and tears streaming down her face as she wailed in her despair: “Give me back my child, give me back my child!”51

The inward visuality is so strong that it overpowers the immediate and actual physical visual field, namely, the kindly servant woman seated in front of Daojing, telling her the tale of her mother’s suffering and demise. The meaning or sense of the narrative is achieved only with the emergence of the visual. This process of interiorization must occur finally as a suspension, or a negation of temporal succession, and must result in the formation of an inward image that is not only extremely vivid, but is also rich in cognitive value. Further, we should note that the “mind’s eye” here is an eye in the particular spiritualized sense both Hegel and Diderot confer upon it, since this eye hears as well. The ultimate cognitive purpose of the image is to capture vividly some essential element of the Chinese social formation, in this case the very image, so to speak, of the human carnage wrought by a ruthless, feudal patriarchy. Shortly after this recollection, walking along the shore, Daojing stops to ask directions from a woman mending nets. It soon becomes painfully apparent that the woman is starving, unable to produce milk for her baby, a tiny child who between fruitless efforts to suckle at his mother’s empty breast, wails in hunger. Several days later, Daojing strolls again on the beach and comes upon the very place where she first came across the mother and child. Asking a fisherman what became of the two pitiful creatures, she learns that the mother, able to bear neither her

51 The translation takes a number of liberties, though for the most part it does a very good job. This line in particular is a case in point. “Mind’s eye” very effectively conveys what both Hegel and Diderot point out. The term is an apt choice, successfully grasping the relation between the physical and spiritual senses of sight, which the original clearly conveys. 一霎间, 她眼前站着的满脸皱纹的老太婆, 忽然变成一 个美丽憔悴的少妇 (Yang, Qingchun, 19).

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own hunger nor her own child’s suffering any longer, has leapt into the ocean with her baby, ending both their lives. Here again, an image: That thin, yellow-waxen face, those fish-like, expressionless eyes, the wailing of the baby with no milk, and the image [lit. xingxiang] of [Daojing’s] mother, with hair-disheveled, howling, “Give me back my child,” all blended together at the same time to produce a gloomy tableau (huamian 画面), which flashed before her eyes.52

We note here, that the recollection of the starving woman and her child, once combined with the further image of her own mother, becomes, in effect, a painting, as again, succession gives way to simultaneity. In the narrative, the two images succeed one another, and yet they acquire meaning only once a purely visual simultaneity is achieved. Importantly, these two images, the woman and Daoing’s mother are blended, into a simultaneous tableau. Are the two images merely juxtaposed, or are they superimposed upon one another, in a manner in which the ultimate visual product, this “gloomy tableau,” reflects the two women in one form, capturing the essence of both, while transcending the contingent, physical singularity of each? The narrative does not say, but in taking on the burden of this image, letting it form and pass before her (mind’s) eyes, Daojing is ideologically transformed and physically overcome. Her legs grow weak, she is suddenly exhausted, and longs painfully to return to her room to collapse on her bed. These are but two examples of the image, early in the novel. In both we can see that Yang Mo’s aesthetic practice is governed by the very same impulse to achieve precisely the inward visual simultaneity of the image Hegel and Diderot describe. In post-liberation China, there was a very strong interest in a notion of literature and other arts as organically related, an interest Song of Youth clearly shares. Of course, with all of this novel’s investment in a critique of modern (Western) aesthetics, the question of the status of a traditional Chinese art and its relative importance must inevitably emerge. How must one treat the Chinese artistic past, a heritage that must have some status in the present and revolutionary future? As we have seen, the position of the Chinese artistic past will not be left to the likes of Yu Yongze and his ilk to determine. It must be weighed and assessed relative to the powerful currents of modern realism that are massively taking hold across the spectrum of modern Chinese artistic endeavor. How specifically is the Chinese aesthetic past figured in this 52

Yang Mo, Qingchun, 32.

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novel? Given the enormous privilege given to Western aesthetics, and, as we shall see, Western notions of classical beauty, where does the art of the Chinese past fit into the picture? There is but one passage in the novel, devoted to a self-conscious description of Chinese architecture and the aesthetic reverie that it arouses in Lin Daojing and her friend, Wang Xiaoyan. The two girls would often stroll quietly past these trees to the parapet of the moat around the Imperial Palace. Sometimes they would gaze at the majestic palace in the silvery moonlight, the rich oriental (dongfang 东方) colors of the lofty roofs with their yellow glazed tile and the imposing towers like colossal images of old gods rising proudly yet mysteriously into the night sky above the moat. In their silent appreciation of this scene, they were invariably deeply impressed by the thoughts of China’s ancient civilization and her great artistic heritage.53

Lin’s experience of oriental architecture, or what Hegel terms symbolic art, is distantly removed from the ancient world in which the “majesty” of Chinese imperial architecture effectively exerted its symbolic force. The sublime magnificence of its “lofty roofs” and “imposing towers” is marked specifically as an artistic bequeath of a civilization that is both ancient and distinctively oriental. Lin Daojing and Wang Xiaoyan 王晓 燕 can lay claim to the Imperial Palace as a heritage precisely because it can no longer lay claim to their ideological identification. The vaguely Hegelian sense that the historical stages and forms of artistic beauty are at play at this point in the novel is further underscored by the appearance a dozen pages later of the key example of Hegel’s second stage of art, namely the classical beauty of Greek sculpture.54 At the conclusion of the scene just described, the two are walking back to Peking University and a car comes to a screeching halt next to

Yang, Song, 370. Cai Yi’s New Aesthetics, first published in Shanghai in 1948, treats Hegel’s discussion of classical Greek sculpture. Cai Yi wenji, 1: 382. Zhu Guangqian’s translation of Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, published first in 1947, also addresses the division of art into different historical periods, “oriental, classical and romantic.” In fact, Zhu Guangqian elaborates in more detail in a footnote on this distinction, specifically indicating that symbolic art is “primarily oriental” (Zhu Guangqian quanji 朱光潜全集 [Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1988], 11: 253). I am not at all sure that Yang Mo read either of these works. Moreover, Zhu Guangqian’s own translation of volume one of Hegel’s Aesthetics did not appear until over a year after Song of Youth was first published. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that by the time she began Song of Youth in the early 1950s, the general features of Hegel’s discussion of fine art were familiar to many in China. 53 54

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them. Lin Daojing is arrested and driven off to prison. She refuses to confess or to give the names of her comrades and is thereupon brutally tortured with a variety of instruments. After three days pass, Lin gradually begins to regain consciousness in her cell. The first face she sees is that of one of her cellmates, Zheng Jin 郑瑾, whose combination of sheer physical beauty and revolutionary courage are figured throughout these scenes in the prison, repeatedly and specifically in terms of the classical ideal of Greek sculpture.55 Daojing’s first words, after opening her eyes and gazing up at Zheng Jin, whose face is described as “white and lustrous, like marble” is the exclamation, “A Greek Goddess!” Daojing’s vision and these words are described as being “extremely out of harmony with reality.” As Daojing’s wounds gradually begin to heal, she will often listen intently as Zheng Jin, the more experienced and tried revolutionary, explains that prison is by no means the end of the road for a true revolutionary. Prison is but another site of struggle and resistance against the oppressor. As Daojing lies in her cot and listens to a series of narratives concerning the sublime courage of revolutionaries in the face of death (for example, political prisoners who while under an imminent death sentence continue to attend their language and political study classes), she stares in wonder at Zheng Jin and says to herself, “She is truly like a marble sculpture—would that I could carve sculpture of her (386).” Zheng Jin, one of the most heroic of the numerous revolutionaries in the novel, appears as if frozen, as though blood has ceased its course through her veins. Indeed, finally, just before Zheng Jin is marched off by her captors to be buried alive, the image of sculpture returns, but this time this three-dimensional figure in external space becomes finally and fully interiorized by Daojing. But first, Zheng Jin confides in Daojing that her real name is Lin Hong 林红: [ Daojing] extended both hands tightly gripping Lin Hong’s snow-white fingers, and for a long while she stared motionless at the exquisite face

55 Symbolic art is followed by classical art, with which the privileged form will be Greek sculpture. Lastly, before the end of art, there is Romantic art, which encompasses, painting, music, and finally, on the very threshold of the emergence of true speculative philosophical thought, poetry: “For through sculpture the spirit should stand before us in blissful tranquility in its bodily form and in immediate unity therewith, and the form should be brought to life by the content of spiritual individuality. . . . In this last respect we must claim for sculpture that in it the inward and the spiritual come into appearance for the first time in their eternal peace and self-sufficiency” (Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 86).

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chapter five of marble sculpture. Daojing’s blood seemed to cease its coursing, and then only a vague, dreamlike image ( yixiang 意象) flashed through her mind: “Can such a person really die? (395)”

Here especially, we see the “vague, dreamlike image” in all of its instantaneous simultaneity collapse into the prose interrogative, “Can such a person really die?” I note also that the punctuation of the sentence, directly equates the image with the question—in other words the question is itself the content of the image. Daojing interiorizes the image of the revolutionary, and the cognitive force of the image and its interiorization transforms her, as she, in effect, becomes Lin Hong. That the now sublated truth, represented by the spirit of Lin Hong has been taken up by Lin Daojing is alluded to several times in the pages that follow. Both Lin Hong (“Lin the Red”) and Lin Daojing share the same surname. The narrator informs us, “Once Lin Hong was dead, without so much as a thought, Daojing automatically took on the tasks of Lin Hong.” Further, their other cellmate, the 15-year-old Shu Xiu 淑秀, now takes Lin Daojing for Lin Hong. Just prior to being released from prison, Daojing, in a gesture of comfort, smoothing the young Shu Xiu’s hair, is described as “unconsciously extremely like Lin Hong.” The one instance in which a traditional Chinese landscape painting figures most prominently in the novel, occurs when Lin Daojing is taking her oath upon joining the Communist Party. Daojing before swearing her allegiance to the Party looks at the wall next to her: Deeply stirred, she raised her glance to the landscape paintings on the dark wall and her face grew grave, her breathing more rapid. In a flash, the paintings faded to be replaced by a great red flag bearing the hammer and sickle, a brilliant, inspiring flag (437).

Not surprisingly, this most cinematic sequence of images is easily reproduced in the film, the physically external image fading into the interiorized image of devotion to the Party. This image of the CCP flag—as yet still a cause and not a State—represents the conclusion and the summation of her ideological formation. The novel concludes with the student-led demonstrations of 1935, in which Daojing plays a pivotal role in helping to organize. Modern Chinese intellectuals thus play a leading role beginning China’s transformation from the dispersive, irrational, feudal, (dis)unity of the pre-revolutionary Chinese folk (minzu 民族) into a modern, rationalized nation-state. The KMT continues to resist the rational formation of the Chinese nation-state,

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failing as it does to understand China’s ultimate relation to history and to the project of the human with which it is bound. The novel stands as testimony to the conviction shared by many left-leaning intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s that the Marxist humanist project of realizing the essence of the human can be realized only through a dialectical aesthetics from whose privileged vantage China’s living revolutionary essence can be glimpsed. Conclusion Song of Youth’s heroine aspires to a world that will be very much one of her own creation and in which what is modern is not defined by the 20th century West that imagines itself the universal expression of historically realized modern rationality. It is likewise a world that actively rejects the identity of Chinese femininity designated by 1930s patriarchal New Life KMT theorists, even to the point that what will constitute the feminine in the revolutionary society of the future remains undecided. Further, what comprises her aesthetic vocation in the world is not limited to the modern literary subjectivity she is called upon to assume in relation to the national literary past. Undoubtedly, Song of Youth’s enormous popularity lay in the fact that the revolution remains a work of progress in the novel and the nature of the world its heroine might someday inhabit was both undecided and yet partially within the sphere of her own creation.56 The novel represents a formidable effort to embody aesthetically a vision of an open-ended, dialectical human entwinement with the world that neither the Cold War West nor KMT dominated Republican China seemed willing to offer. Ironically, this 600 page novel is premised in part on the conviction that a modern Chinese, purely literary aesthetics will fail in what had become its most important task since May Fourth, namely the forging of a fully adequate, human relationship between “art and life.” It is this essential relationship that is the constant topic of Lin Daojing

56 When, as I indicated earlier, Lin Daojing asks what China might be like under communism, readers clearly took away from the question her sense of wonder. Even those readers in 1959 who might well have felt they knew enough about Maoism’s historical trajectory in China, could still fully identify with Lin’s sheer will to find out. The novel plays most successfully to its utopian horizons where the accomplishment of the tasks of the revolution seem most distant.

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and Yu Yongze’s conversations at Beidaihe, early in the novel. When, as I noted earlier Yu Yongze announces that he has abandoned “pure literature” we sense the clear implication that Lin Daojing will do so as well, though in a diametrically different manner. For Lin the vital revolutionary connection between desire and the aesthetic must be one forged through dialectical engagement with the world. For this reason, Yang Mo’s allegiances are necessarily less with literature, especially as an autonomous artistic discipline, than with the organic, materialist aesthetics of the image. Meng Yue writes with characteristic precision that, Although Lin’s mobility is initially predicated on her rejection of the male dominant order, it ends not in a broadening or a continuation of the modern tradition of woman’s writing but rather with a displacement of it. The novel never gives a revealing picture, as for instance Zhang Ailing’s Qing Cheng Zhi Lian had, of the conflict between a single woman’s fortune and the whole nation or whole civilization.57

In my own reading of the novel, I have tried to suggest that it quite consciously works toward and accomplishes precisely that “displacement” directly through a rejection of a certain kind of modern Chinese female writer. Meng Yue’s sensitivity to the novel’s ultimate failure on this count is important precisely because it helps to explain why it is nearly impossible to read Song of Youth without a feeling of dread that the very productive negativity with which Lin Daojing is so closely allied throughout much of the novel would always remain in danger of being transformed into new and equally repressive positivities.58 Lin’s early question about the negation of the negation would, in a sense then be answered from the limited perspective of Hegel’s abstract understanding,

Meng Yue, “Female Images,” 127. The signs of this crop up periodically throughout the novel, especially in those moments where everything and everyone suddenly seems to fit ever so snugly into its teleologically pre-ordained ideological place. When this happens, an extreme clarity of ideological vision arrives to still the productive unrest that Lin embraces throughout much of the novel. Pointing to a young man, Daojing exclaims, “Look, Xiaoyan! Do you think he’s a Communist?”. . . . “I think you’re bewitched. What grounds do you have for saying he’s a Communist?” “You can tell he’s honest, firm and serious. . . . I believe Communists may differ in appearance and temperament, but they have many common characteristics. The young man who just passed looked more serious than ordinary people” (Yang Mo, Song, 375). At such points, the name her Buddhist-inclined father gave her, “stillness of the Way” (Daojing), and which she reviles both for her father’s contribution and for the devout serenity/ideological vacuity it implies, comes back to haunt her. 57 58

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through formalizing “the dialectic in terms of its triadic structure,”59 thereby arresting the “innermost source of all activity . . . the dialectical soul that everything true passes through.”60 This failure is all the more profound when we consider that the very negativity that Yang Mo so effectively and affectingly sets loose in her heroine was the very one the Beida philosopher Zhang Shiying, writing at the same time in the 1950s, had identified as central to the Marxist dialectic. The foregoing analysis of Song of Youth has been motivated in part by a desire to see how the novel speaks to the complexity of dialectical materialism’s relationship to Chinese socialist aesthetics.61 Far from calling for a re-embrace of socialist realism, I would argue that it remains important politically to come to a deeper understanding of its failures. What I have tried to suggest is that we are better equipped to grasp those failures as well as learn from them by finding ways to read them through the vital political and philosophical questions that so thoroughly animated the project of socialist aesthetics as a whole. This would mean finding different ways to read such texts with the grain so that we might be better equipped to read them against the grain. One way to accomplish this task is to read Song of Youth as much as possible according to its avowed convictions, even as those convictions themselves remain always at risk of being betrayed.

59 Diane Coole, Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (London: Routledge, 2000), 73. 60 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1990), 835. 61 One reviewer was concerned that there are problems with conflating Yang Mo’s novel with socialist realism as a whole. I do think the novel takes seriously the task of engaging then current philosophical aesthetics, but this does not in itself bring it any closer to other important works such as Zhou Libo’s 周立波 Hurricane (Baofeng zhuyu 暴 风骤雨) or Liu Qing’s 柳青 Builders of a New Life (Chuangye shi 创业史). I am grateful to the reviewer on this count since it indicates another very important problem in our account of socialist realism, namely the need to insist on a far more nuanced reading of its complex historical contours. At the very least, the reading of Song of Youth I suggest above should indicate just how differently the problem of socialist realism was treated in the 1950s and early-1960s relative to the late-1960s and 1970s. I hasten to add that this clarification is by no means meant to suggest that the latter historical period is any less worthy of more careful and detailed consideration.

CONCLUSION

EXEMPLARITY IN LUO GUANGBIN AND YANG YIYAN’S HONGYAN: FROM WHITE TERROR TO “RED CLASSIC” I would like to conclude with an examination of Luo Guangbin 罗广斌 and Yang Yiyan’s 杨益言 novel Hongyan 红岩 in light of the aporetic concept of the Bildungsroman. As Marc Redfield has shown and as I will explain in more detail in what follows, although the term Bildungsroman has extraordinarily broad currency in literary studies, modern literary criticism has had considerable difficulty proving such novels actually exist. It is clear that Chinese socialist realist novels emerged with the traditional tasks of the Bildungsroman very much in mind, despite the surprisingly aporetic nature of this quintessentially modern literary concept.1 Readers of Song of Youth and my earlier discussion no doubt have little difficulty considering that novel in light of the concept of the Bildungsroman, since it comes closest to accomplishing what we expect of such works. Such may not be the case, however, for readers familiar with Luo and Yang’s novel which seems more to narrate the dramatic exploits of committed revolutionaries who appear almost uniformly to have already fully accomplished their revolutionary Bildung prior to the novel’s beginning. Of course, while this is largely true of most of the novel’s key figures such as Jiang Jie 江姐 ( Jiang Zhujun 江竹君), Cheng Gang 成刚, Xu Yunfeng 许云峰, etc., the thematic of individual subjective formation is nonetheless central to the character of Liu Siyang 刘思扬, in whose character the reader is afforded the clearest image of revolutionary Bildung. Indeed, I would argue that while Jiang Jie is clearly the most renowned figure to emerge as part of the novel’s pantheon of revolutionary heroes, it is Liu Siyang as petty bourgeois intellectual turned revolutionary in whom the reader is best able to sense the kind of narrative momentum traditionally associated with the

1 Redfield glosses the term as follows: “For since the Bildungsroman narrates the acculturation of a self—the integration of a particular ‘I’ into the general subjectivity of a community, and thus, finally, into the universal subjectivity of humanity—the genre can be said to repeat, as its identity or content, its own synthesis of particular instance and general form” (Redfield, Phantom Formations, 38).

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Bildungsroman. By the same token, Fu Zhigao 甫志高 as petty bourgeois intellectual turned revolutionary turned then, finally, ruthless traitor offers Liu Siyang his direct foil in that process. But what interests me in the novel and why I would propose still to consider it in reference to the category of Bildungsroman is because it narrates a subjective formation in relation to modern universality. Given Redfield’s primary interest in how the Bildungsroman—both as “phantom” genre and literary critical term—develops in the West, it is hardly surprising that his discussion of how the Bildungsroman might have taken shape in relation to socialist realism in socialist countries is both thin and dismissive.2 When he turns momentarily to the problem of “fascist or totalitarian Marxist narratives,” he notes that the “masses” become the Subject of these narratives, rather than individual-subject-heroes that inhabit what have traditionally (and problematically) been deemed Bildungsromane.3 What Hongyan narrates is the emergence of modern subjectivity as the separation that is the installation of universality. As readers of not only Zizek and Alain Badiou are aware, the problem of how to understand the kind of revolutionary insurrection that Hongyan describes is examined by each in relation to the structure exemplified by Christianity—and, Zizek adds—Buddhism as well. Zizek writes, Christianity (and in its own way, Buddhism) introduced into this global balanced cosmic order [of Paganism and Hinduism respectively] a principle that is totally foreign to it, a principle which, measured by the standards of pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion: the principle according to which each individual has immediate access to universality (of nirvana, of the Holy Spirit, or, today, of human Rights and freedoms): I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my special place with the global social order.4

Zizek, it should be noted, is as radically antipathetic to the claims of modern, especially U.S. versions of Chrisitan fundamentalism on the political right as he is to all “New Age” religions on the liberal left. As

Redfield, Phantom Formations, 53. While Redfield is certainly correct to underscore the connection between the “translation of the Subject into the fantastic immediacies of blood and race” and the “exacerbation of aesthetic ideology,” his glancing mention of socialist Bildungsroman risks the kind of conflation of fascism with communism Zizek inveighs against (Slavoj Zizek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism, 5). Redfield mentions no socialist novels, whether Soviet, East German or otherwise. 4 Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 120. 2 3

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a Marxist, what Zizek claims to endorse in Christianity and Buddhism is their demand to “ ‘unplug’ from the organic community into which we were born.”5 As such, what most definitively marks the structure of universality is precisely what the novel Hongyan most insistently invokes, namely the violent separation or gap between the imprisoned communists and their KMT captors.6 As I will show here in my conclusion, reading the novel in light of a specifically (Hegelian-)Marxist notion of universality—and without prejudice to its origins—can help us much better understand why the novel remains strangely compelling. For the uniformly low critical regard socialist realist novels have endured in the West has not enabled us to account for why such works were not only so popular when they first appeared, but also remain so, nearly a half a century later, albeit in very different forms.7 I will further argue that Hongyan realizes in a very specific fashion key elements of the modern concept of literature, especially in the way it figures so predominately the philosophical dimension of modern subjectivity. As I have sought to show in this study, the crisis of 20th-century Chinese realism can best be grasped in light of the way the post-Kantian subject of romanticism inexorably engenders what becomes the most insistent content of modern Chinese socialist realism, namely the overarching thematics of modernity: “History, Consciousness[. . .]Will, Freedom, Art, Man,” to quote Jean-Luc Nancy’s list from his Gravity of Thought.8 What is remarkable in the case of Hongyan as a “red classic” is the manner in which these very heavily loaded (post-)metaphysical thematics are played out in the novel. For as we will shortly see, Hongyan speaks in a specific way and repeatedly to the very distance between the modern concept of literature as I have argued it developed in China

Zizek, Fragile Absolute, 121. Zizek continues “. . . Christianity asserts as the highest act precisely what pagan wisdom condemns as the source of Evil: the gesture of separation, of drawing the line, of clinging to an element that disturbs the balance of All. . . .; it is the violent intrusion of Difference that precisely throws the balanced circuit of the universe off the rails (Zizek, Fragile Absolute, 121, italics in original).” 7 In September of 2005 audiences in Shanghai were paying as much as 600 yuan a ticket to see “Praise for the Red Plum Blossom” (Hongmei zan 红梅赞), a lavish, contemporary ballet production based upon the saga of “Jiang Jie,” Hongyan’s most prominent female revolutionary martyr. 8 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Exhaustion of Signification,” in The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997), 43–45, 44. 5 6

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and the institution of modern Chinese literary studies as it took further shape in the wake of Hsia’s History.9 In other words, this often bloody novel speaks graphically and in typically hyperbolic manner not simply to the static Cold War opposition between “Communism” and “Capitalism.” Too often, these novels are treated critically as mere Chinese socialist versions of B-grade Hollywood Westerns with all the moral dramatic complexity of black- and white-hatted cowboys.10 Instead, I will argue that the novel stages the emergence of the universal (in Luo and Yang’s case, communism) precisely through the revolutionary subject’s immediate identification with a modern concept of freedom (or, perhaps more aptly, Nancy’s “Freedom”). Hongyan achieves a decisive exemplarity on the count, in part because it shares this same feature with other “red classics.” As the reader will recall from my introduction, one of the legacies of McCarthyism for the Area Studies was the near-complete neglect of the very philosophical discourse which China since the late-19th century embraced with such remarkable consistency. Indeed, for well over a decade after Liberation, the series of philosophemes surrounding the problems of human subjectivity, (Marxist-)Hegelian dialectical negativity, and human species-being from the early Marx—all of which we will see circulate within Hongyan’s narrative—become precisely the ones that vanish almost completely from the curricula of North American philosophy departments. The institution of modern Chinese literary studies inherited a curious legacy in which, as I showed was the case with C. T. Hsia, the modern discourse of aesthetics that played so decisive a role in the formation of the modern concept of literature in 20th-century China was largely disavowed. At the same time, the specific form of New Criticism that Hsia would deploy in his History was itself formed out of an aesthetic critique of modernity that shared fundamental features with 20th-century Marxist criticism. In the case of

9 It is unnecessary to overstate the impact of Hsia’s History on the work of those who came after him. Indeed, as I have argued in this study, the actual impact of his work was mitigated substantially by the general impression that Hsia’s work embodied the kind of liberal, humanist New Criticism that was in fact embraced more pervasively by some of his admirers than by Hsia himself. But I would also refer once more to Rey Chow’s claim noted earlier that modern Chinese literary studies was practiced largely in the form of New Criticism or as Hegelianism. 10 Of course, Zizek is by no means alone in teaching us just how much more is at stake in “popular culture” or what I have earlier termed vernacular literary modernism of socialist realism.

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Hsia, my point is by no means to underestimate his capacity to engage his subject philosophically, since in fact I have been arguing that the History is premised upon a specifically onto-theological conception of human being—a fact the text itself confirms repeatedly. The History is thus in tacit sympathy with Ransom’s sense that the philosophical is both necessary and inevitable in the task of literary criticism.11 What is essential to keep in mind in the case of Chinese socialist realist novels like Hongyan, is that the way the philosophical takes shape in such works has little to do with what one might imagine as some mechanical translation of philosophical concepts into the medium of literature. As I showed earlier, in Cai Yi’s aesthetics, the universal is not something given beforehand in the form of a concept and then rendered in sensible form by the artist. Rather, the universal is revealed through the individual thing in the artist’s dialectical materialist engagement with reality. In the very same way Hsia’s literary criticism is premised on an ultimately metaphysical conception of human being, the novel Hongyan is just as profoundly shaped by the same concern for the emergence of the true figure of the human, though in a radically different manner. Revisioning the History of Hongyan Before turning to my analysis of the novel itself, it will be helpful to present some of the complex series of historical events the novel attempts to detail. My purpose here is less to explain the background of the novel than it is to examine briefly some of the reasons why the novel and the events out of which it evolved have taken on a certain contemporary urgency both in China and North America. The history the novel relates has been the more recent focus of a revisionist historiography both in China and the United States, provoking a genuinely uncanny return to what was without question the most bitter and divisive issue in the 1950s to shape the course of North American China studies, namely the “question” of “Who lost China?” Or, to translate for contemporary ears the actual content of that interrogative utterance,

11 I quote John Crowe Ransom on the relationship between modern philosophy and modern literary criticism: “I don’t know how it is possible to deny the literary critic the advantages of philosophy; I suppose we have fears that he, or his audience, will be unequal to them. But doesn’t he try for a radical and decisive understanding of poetry?” (Ransom, “The Concrete Universal,” 383).

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“Which Roosevelt administration officials created policies that both ensured the Chinese Nationalist defeat and in the same stroke, allowed the Chinese communists to come to power?” In the past ten years, the actual historical events surrounding the origins of Hongyan became the focus of renewed interest. Scholars in the U.S. began to re-examine the decade of the 1940s and the complex relationship between the U.S. on the one hand and the KMT and the CCP on the other. A series of works has emerged in recent years claiming to shed more light on the role of the U.S. and especially the successes and failures of its intelligence services in China during World War II. Several of these works directly address the bitter bureaucratic turf wars waged among the Office of Strategic Services and, the Army and Navy’s respective intelligence organizations as they struggled for dominance in the Chinese theatre. This kind of bureaucratic history makes for striking reading in the post-9/11 world in which the U.S. intelligence establishment has been devastated by charges of incompetence and infighting. The history surrounding the work of the Office of Strategic Services and, even more controversially, the U.S. Navy’s own intelligence services in China is fraught with some of the most bitter and decisive issues in the formation of postwar North American East Asian Area Studies. Indeed, such works as Yu Maochun’s OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War, partially replays what I noted above were the most politically heated 1950s debates in the U.S. regarding “who lost China?” Yu tends to side with those who during the war felt that Chinese communism posed a much greater threat to China’s future than Japan’s imperial armies.12 The book stands as a stark retort to several postwar generations of China Area Studies scholars who (along with the vast majority of Chinese in the mainland) concluded quite some time ago that China was never the U.S.’s to lose. Indeed, one of the central questions in the historical debate concerning US intelligence services in the China theatre was the role of the so-called “China hands.” U.S. Navy Rear-Admiral Milton Miles, as the American head of Sino-American Cooperation Organization (hereafter, SACO) specifically stipulated that he wanted only young Americans who were “absolutely unacquainted with the Orient.”13 The very worst Yu Maochun, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 13 Frederic E. Wakeman, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 460n4. The full name was Sino12

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prospects as American advisors to SACO for not only Milton Miles, but for “spymaster” Dai Li 戴笠, the head of KMT’s notorious Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Military Affairs Commission (hereafter Juntong 军统),14 as well, were American scholars and specialists of Asia who could read and speak Asian languages. What is very important to keep in mind is that in the contemporary revisionist scholarship on SACO, Dai Li, and U.S. intelligence services in China, the so-called “China hands” are viewed with considerable suspicion, especially those who were publicly critical of Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime government and Dai Li’s brutal suppression of the political dissent. Frederic Wakeman’s Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service offers the most detailed portrait to date of the man who helped create China’s secret police and who was known to many at the time as “China’s Himmler.” Wakeman’s book represents yet another recent U.S. work to focus upon the man who would become central to the legacy that would become Hongyan, namely Dai Li, probably the most feared man in China during the 1930s and early 1940s. To any critic or opponent of Chiang Kai-shek, whether academic, journalist, or underground Communist party member, Dai Li was the malevolent force behind the reign of White Terror in the 1930s and 1940s. Though he died in a plane crash in March of 1946, his legacy was central to the historical events of Hongyan for the next three years until November 1949, when nearly all 300 of the political prisoners at the Zhazidong 渣滓洞 and Baigongguan 白宫馆 concentration camps were machine-gunned to death. Of the dozen or so prisoners who managed to escape this bloodbath, three men, Luo Guangbin, Yang Yiyan, and Liu Debin 刘德彬 would go on to chronicle the events that took place in the camps, doing so in several formats in the 1950s, culminating in the novel Hongyan in 1961. The novel was an enormous success, selling approximately 6.8 million copies in 126 printings.15 And yet the legacy of the novel itself would prove enormously complex, as I have begun to suggest above. Luo Guangbin would not survive the Cultural Revolution, and the persistent rumors that he and Liu Debin were given special treatment

American Special Technical Cooperative Organization (Zhongmei tezhong jishu hezuosuo 中美特种技术合作所). 14 The full Chinese name is Junshi weiyuanhui diaochao tongji ju 军事委员会调查统 计局. 15 See Perry Link, The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 175.

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and released by their captors because of family connections continue to this day. If the postwar political history of SACO was bitterly contested in the U.S., it has been no less so in China. The novel begins in January of 1949 with the world teetering precariously on the brink of a nuclear World War III. Of course, it was completed around 1960 and hence after the Korean War, but even by that time, the U.S. had already achieved the unrivaled status as what the book clearly regards as the major post-war imperialist power. Hongyan is one of the first Chinese socialist realist novels to feature the United States so prominently. Song of Youth, barely mentions the United States, and when it does, it is merely the source of decadent and noxious Hollywood popular culture.16 Zhou Libo’s 1950 classic, Hurricane, takes place against the larger backdrop of US support for the KMT in the last days of the Civil War in northeast China, but the U.S. is figured only distantly, if nonetheless menacingly. Hongyan, however, is set in postwar Chongqing toward the end of the Civil War, and as such, the U.S. presence on the ground can be evoked consistently. Nearly all versions of this tale do precisely that at the outset though in different ways and to different degrees. Both the novel and the film have Americans as characters. In Eternal Life in the Flames (Zai liehuo zhong yongsheng 在烈火中永生), Luo Guangbin, Yang Yiyan, and Liu Debin provided an initial reportage retelling of the events in the Zhazidong and the Baigongguan, two concentration camps that were part of SACO. SACO had been set up as a joint Chinese-US operation, funded heavily by the US, outfitted with US supplies, and manned with over 2000 U.S. agents. As this reportage version recounts, Within the confines of SACO were established several concentration camps especially for imprisoning revolutionaries. The equipment in the concentration camps, from the handcuffs, shackles and instruments of torture used in the interrogation of those imprisoned, the tape record16 The novel touches on heroine Lin Daojing and hero Luo Dafang’s reactions to the music. In Song of Youth, the student communists must acquire visceral antipathy for the melodious strains of American pop music, if their class origins have not allowed them to do so “naturally.” Luo Dafang, of sound proletarian birth, can whistle such tunes freely in public in order to disguise his underground party member identity without suffering the ideologically corrosive effects of the bourgeois popular culture. Main protagonist Lin Daojing only gradually through arduous struggle acquires her own immunity. The popularity of such figures as Lin Daojing lies very much in the fact that they are able to overcome their (partially) bourgeois origins. They stood as powerful testimony against the kind of “class essentialism” that would engulf Chinese socialism very quickly after liberation.

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ers, the high-caliber pistols and silencers all bore the words, “MADE IN THE USA.”17

Wakeman quotes Hugh Deane’s Good Deeds and Gunboats, in which Deane describes his tour of the Happy Valley Revolutionary Memorial (歌乐 山革命 纪念馆) dedicated to the prison facility: “We turn a corner and see instruments of torture—bamboo slivers for driving under fingernails, a flexible steel whip said to be of U.S. make, a nail-studded club used in what was call the Mourning torture.”18 Citing the same work, Wakeman describes a photograph of a “pit in which ninety-four bodies were bound with handcuffs made in Springfield, Massachusetts.”19 I will discuss the details of Luo, and Yang’s narrative strategy in the novel below, but for the time being I simply want to emphasize how all versions of these events figure the U.S. prominently. While immediate responsibility for the horrors of Happy Valley clearly lay with Dai Li and his Juntong successors, the novel succeeds in branding the entire operation of SACO as “Made in the USA.” It is this important American element of the Hongyan complex of meanings that becomes the subject of the current historical revision in U.S. scholarship that has taken place regarding this notorious institution. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind the way the U.S. saturates the atmosphere in the novel.20 First, we need to recall that the U.S. really began forging its Cold War counter-insurgency skills in Asia here at SACO. Indeed the novel alludes to the fact that SACO would become an important site for widening the war against communism on an international level. In the scene of a teahouse meeting between underground Party member Xu Yunfeng and Vice-Secretary of the Chongqing Municipal underground Li Jingyuan 李敬原, the latter informs Xu of recent underground intelligence that has revealed that [t]he American Advisory Department at SACO has recently reshuffled and an international spy, with the rank of brigadier-general, has just

17 Luo Guangbin, Yang Yiyan, and Liu Debin, Eternal Life in the Flames (Zai Liehuo zhong yongsheng) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1993), 7. 18 Wakeman, Dai Li, 283. 19 Wakeman, Dai Li, 305. 20 In director Shui Hua’s 1965 film Liehuo zhong yong sheng 烈火中永生, the opening sequence figures the U.S. prominently. A laborer carries crate labeled “75 Millimeter Anti-aircraft Shells.” After the Cultural Revolution, the stage musical Jiang Jie was once again shown. In this stage version of Hongyan, the U.S. seems to recede somewhat from view. In all versions, it is simply understood that the KMT as such, has delayed its exit from this stage of history by relying on U.S. military support.

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conclusion arrived. . . . Various signs indicate that the “visitor” has already managed to get close to the underground Party organization.21

This scene alludes to one of the most contentious areas in recent revisionist historiography surrounding the status of SACO after the defeat of Japan and the end of the war in the Pacific. The novel maintains that SACO was not formally disbanded, but rather took the struggle against the Chinese communists to a higher, more intense, and global level. With the war over, Juntong and its American advisors could turn all their attention to the problem they had long felt was paramount, namely crushing the communist insurgency in China. As many have more recently pointed out, SACO did formally cease to exist organizationally after the Japanese surrender. What will no doubt remain in bitter dispute for many years to come is SACO’s legacy. Wakeman concedes that there is a direct link between SACO’s formation and activities on the one hand, and the origins of U.S. Cold War anti-communist counterinsurgency efforts all over the world. Wakeman writes, The SACO training program also established a sinister precedent for similar secret service activities later under the auspices of the Central Intelligence Agency. The modus operandi of the CIA, after all, was to train secret policemen throughout the world, especially in Latin America during the 1960s. At a minimum, some of the public security training program carried out under the auspices of the Agency for International Development in the Panama Canal Zone and the School of the Americas hearkened back to America’s wartime experience with SACO’s “ricepaddy gunboats.”22

Wakeman also notes that SACO represented the first instance of U.S. advisors providing training to a non-Western police force who were then devoted to brutally suppressing internal dissent. SACO was in many essential respects the precursor for Fort Benning’s “US Army School of the Americas,” whose purpose was to train Latin American

21 Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, Red Crag (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), 153. 22 “This was one of the first times that American special operations officers trained police for intelligence-gathering purposes only to find themselves accused of connivance with the forces of right-wing dictatorship. To that extent, whatever the truth of Communist propaganda, the SACO program of training Dai Li’s secret agents exposed wartime American intelligence efforts to outright incrimination” (Wakeman, Dai Li, 304).

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security forces in counterinsurgency techniques.23 What is clear, however, is that the events and their literary and film representation, all took place within the historical context of what was perceived as the global struggle between U.S. imperialist capitalism and communism. While this epic theme of conflict between capitalism and socialism had been around in China since the early 20th century, it had largely been understood in historical terms. In the immediate postwar period the geographical nature of the conflict was more acutely represented by the actual presence of the imperialist U.S. in Asia after World War II. The novel thus differs from many other works that present the conflict as one between China’s socialist future in emergence and its feudal past. As we will see, Hongyan plays up this conflict as well, though in quite different ways which speak directly to how political modernity is characterized by a specific kind of subjective formation. Luo Guangbin claims that the Baigongguan held 100 prisoners, while the Zhazidong held over 300, or, at least, each was designed for that many. Both ended up holding far more than what they were designed for, according to the account of survivors.24 Luo, Yang, and Liu claim that, given the fact that few people spent more than three to six months there before being taken off to be shot, during the ten years of their existence, as many as 2000 people died or were shot there. In any case, it was the events in late November of 1949 that gave the prison its notoriety. With the People’s Liberation Army about to liberate Chongqing, orders were sent down to execute all prisoners in both the Baigongguan and

23 Now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the legacy of human rights violations this notorious institution has left in its wake is enormous. The School of the Americas was only one of 150 existing U.S. institutions both in the U.S. and abroad that train foreign police. According to a Newsweek report, there was a heated debate in the Pentagon about what was known as the “Salvadoran Option,” that is, whether to deploy Salvadoran-style death squads into Iraq to cope with the mounting insurgency. See Michael Hirsh and John Barry, “Special Forces May Train Assassins, Kidnappers in Iraq: The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq” Newsweek, Jan. 14, 2005, http://www .msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/print/1/displaymode/1098, accessed September 18, 2008). This “web exclusive” version of the article updated a January 8, 2005 version that appeared in print and includes a response from the then Ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte. Negroponte was the Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 during the Reagan administration and has been linked to Human Rights violations in both Honduras and El Salvador. See Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006). 24 Luo, Liu and Yang, Liehuo zhong, 7–8.

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the Zhazidong. At four in the afternoon of November 27, 1949, the executions began at the Baigongguan, beginning with Generals Huang Xiansheng 黄显声, and Li Yingyi 李英毅, the latter having served with Zhang Xueliang 张学良. Xu Xiaoxuan 许晓轩 was next. To him was attributed in this account the final words that would later comprise one of many important and controversial textual legacies of Hongyan, the “Report on the Sabotage of the Chongqing Party Organization and the Prison Situation” (“Chongqing dangzuzhi pohuai jingyan he yuzhong qingxingde baogao” 重庆党组织破坏经过和狱中情形 的报告). Luo quotes Xu’s last words as, “Please ask the party to pay constant attention to Party consolidation, Party rectification, strengthen education, and enhance the Party’s fighting capacity.”25 No where else in this work is the report mentioned. But it is clear that Xu’s request alludes to it. In question is the peculiar status of the “Report.” It represents the claims made by dead revolutionary martyrs upon living Chinese Communist Party leaders. For countless other revolutionary martyrs, death brought silence. In this case, a document emerged, seemingly from beyond the grave. Their last words were not simply revolutionary slogans shouted into the face of a hail of bullets, but a critique of Party organization and a clear demand that any Party that claimed to honor their sacrifice should also heed their warnings about weakness in the Party leadership. This group of dead revolutionary martyrs laid moral claim to a present that they could not share. While it was common for martyrs to leave behind letters written to their children urging them to live up to their responsibilities as children of revolutionary martyrs in New China, it was rare for the dead to speak directly and publically to the Party leadership. What of course complicated all of this was that it fell to Luo, Yang, and Lin to actually write up the “Report.” They themselves, as surviving mediators of this testimony, and in fact nearly all other accounts of those events, bore the most ambiguous and fraught of responsibilities.26 As I noted above, the very fact that they managed to survive was itself the subject of rumor and speculation beginning Luo, Liu and Yang, Liehuo zhong, 70. The entire document is said to be 27,000 characters long, but it is normally distilled down to eight points which head eight sections. “The eight points are as follows. 1) Prevent Party corruption. 2) Enhance both education within the Party and training for actual struggle. 3) Don’t be idealistic, and superstitious towards Party superiors. 4) Pay attention to the Party line. Don’t leap from “right” to “left.” 5) Never underestimate the enemy. 6) Take seriously the economic, love relations and lifestyle problems of Party members and especially leading cadres (Eight Opinions from Prison 狱中 25 26

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very soon after liberation, throughout the 1950s and through the early part of the Cultural Revolution. Revolutionary Insurrection and Universality The concentration camps in Geleshan were places that came to embody for post-Liberation the very worst of the White Terror, which began in Shanghai in 1927. They possessed a particularly notorious status in large part because of the link to the United States. The struggles of political prisoners in the camp were of a different order. They battled not only the KMT as a part of the broader Civil War, but also the United States, and in this latter sense, their struggles took on the broader significance of the global battle for proletarian revolution. This point is illustrated in the novel in one crucial scene in which the communist Cheng Gang is interrogated by Americans, using what are described as the most advanced forensic pharmaceuticals of the day. In that scene, the battle is no longer between the fascist brutality of the KMT Juntong torture specialists and the sheer physical endurance of the revolutionary. The primitive agonies of the body are sidestepped by the Americans who press on to the source of revolutionary will deep within the spiritual recesses of the revolutionary’s consciousness. Under the influence of a “truth serum” injected by an American doctor, Cheng Gang struggles desperately to retain full control over his mind and words, even as the drug weakens his ability to distinguish between reality and the illusion deceptively evoked by his foreign interrogators that his comrade Xu Yunfeng is present: The drug had both a numbing and stimulant effect on the central nervous system. The abnormal combination of this numbing and stimulation produced extremely rapid responses, hallucinations and impulses, such that if the patient relaxed his vigilance (sangshi jingjue 丧失警觉) or for a moment lost control of himself, he would answer any question posed him, pouring out his innermost secrets. Cheng Gang saw a tall, gaunt figure who seemed to be dressed in a white medical uniform. Cheng Gang struggled to get a better look at him and finally saw clearly that he had curly hair the color of burlap thinly covering his balding head, a prominent, hugely bulging nose bridge,

八条意见,” (http://www.hongyan.info/gb/news/news_detail.asp?id=2564, accessed September 18, 2008).

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conclusion a pair of eyeballs sunk deeply into their sockets, each the color of dull slate. This white-skinned foreigner stretched out a hairy hand gesturing to his companion with a pair of rat-like eyes. The rat-like eyes blinked and the thin lips above the pointed chin moved slightly: “I am Xu Yunfeng. Cheng Gang, I am Lao Xu!27

The site here under imperialist attack is precisely the now fully present revolutionary “soul” as the image (Bild ) of the human-in-formation (Bildung) that, I noted earlier, Arthur Smith deemed wholly absent in China. Cheng Gang embodies the self-overcoming of the para-human condition Song of Youth’s Lin Daojing deplores as that of the “soulless living dead.”28 But what is likewise remarkable about this passage is the way the scene figures in dramatic form what are in essence the hazards the artistic-producer as dialectical materialist encounters in her engagement with the world. In the novel’s terms, the extraordinary capacity to capture the truth as universal within the dynamic flux of hallucinatory reality imposed by the drug is available primarily to professional revolutionaries of long experience. More fundamentally, what the novel here installs is a conception of human subjectivity that takes form in a dialectical materialist pursuit of universality. To be so thoroughly subjected to the brutal dictates of the KMT’s most notorious concentration camp, caged in overcrowded cells, starved, tortured, diseased, and armed only with the resources of the spirit, is clearly figured in the novel as the purest and most difficult test of revolutionary will and the power of collective action. Moreover, the novel’s description of the American doctor’s administration of “the latest achievement of American science”29 was clearly meant to have an incendiary effect on Hongyan’s readership in the early 1960s. As is so characteristic of the kind of dialectical exchange between truth and falsehood that governs the structure of the narrative, the Americans falsely represent the injection of the truth serum to Cheng Gang as a penicillin injection meant to help him recover from the infected wounds they ordered inflicted upon him in interrogations. They further duplicitously assert to Cheng Gang that tending to his torture wounds is motivated by the American doctors’ “love of humanity.” Like so

Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 400. Yang, Qingchun, 42. As I noted in the previous chapter, the English translation has merely “living death,” but the original Chinese uses the more elaborate “meiyou linghun de xingshi zourou” or a “soulless walking corpse.” 29 Luo and Yang, Red Crag, 387. 27 28

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much of the novel, such notions as the “love of humanity” are vitally contested by the CCP and KMT, with representatives of the latter suffering from a near congenital inability to properly grasp the true essence of such concepts. In Hongyan the communists represent not a force of protest, but rather a genuine insurgency against the entire established order of Republican China. The camps become the sites of the final, most personal and intimate violence between two clashing ideologies. In the novel, the relationships between KMT interrogator and revolutionary are underscored continually as physically immediate. The mise-en-scene of the interrogation room allows for dialogue, debate, and dramatic presentation of clashing ideologies. The sheer anonymity of the mortar shell or hail of bullets renders the encounter between KMT and Eighth Route Army regular void of the elaborate give and take the torture chamber affords. Even when the interrogated prisoner fails to answer in the prescribed manner, Hongyan never leaves the tortured revolutionary merely silent. Language must be brought to bear on the part of the revolutionary, even if its content merely enrages the interrogator for its avowed refusal to offer information or confession. The prisoner had been taught to fully avail herself of the opportunity to speak, if only to carry the struggle into the minds of the torturers themselves. The most telling example of this is Jiang Jie’s utterance “I know the names and addresses of my superiors, and I know also the names and addresses of my subordinates. But they are secrets of our Party and I cannot tell them to you.”30 This is no doubt one of the most famous lines in Hongyan’s entire vast store of revolutionary lore and precedes what is also one of the most infamous events, namely Jiang Jie’s having bamboo slivers driven under each of her finger nails a grisly event repeated in the novel, the film and the play.31 Such words serve not

Luo, Yang and Lin, Zai leihuo, 17. Like so many events in the Hongyan phenomenon, this is the subject of controversy, with He Shu 何蜀 in particular claiming it an exaggeration and fabrication. While He Shu does not dispute the fact that she was tortured and executed without ever having “confessed,” he rules out the use of bamboo strips (He Shu, “Jiangji shouguode daodi shi shenme kuxing 江姐受过 的到底是什么酷刑?” Wenshi jinghua文史精华 [2004年第 5 期]). He Shu does not mention Juntong member Shen Zui’s 沈醉 autobiographical account of the torture in which he confirms the use of bamboo strips. Shen Zui, like Xu Yuanju 徐远举 who headed the Juntong’s “Southwest Bureau” and on whom the character Xu Pengfei is based, was captured after liberation. Both men oversaw the torture of Jiang Jie. He Shu, like many others, is likely suspicious of Shen Zui’s account, seeing it the mere product of the years of “reeducation” he experienced in Communist 30 31

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only to assert the simple fact that such information is forbidden to nonParty members, but they are meant also to perform the separation and difference between genuine communists and all others. Her defiance is all the more marked because she chooses to display formally and explicitly her possession of a knowledge that shall never be theirs. In any case, she can never be merely silent during the interrogation. She must speak the truth even as she defies her captors to extract the truth from her. We find the same with Cheng Gang in the novel, whose “written confession” (zibaishu 自白书) performs an act of defiance with equal inevitability. His reportedly spontaneous poetic offering has also been the subject of a long standing controversy which I will discuss below. In any case, the dialectic between KMT and CCP is accomplished through the dialogical exchange between the representatives of each in the interrogation room. Torture brings both forces face to face and gives each a human representation, even if KMT Juntong operatives and prison wardens are figured as animal-like (“Owl,” “Gorilla,” and Xu Pengfei himself as “spider,” etc.).32 The interrogation room exchange must become a battle fought actively and fully by both sides, not merely one in which the revolutionary passively resists the effort to pry the truth from them. The human body must be offered up as empty of the truth, little more than flesh to be abused for the KMT. It can be flayed, beaten, invaded, but the

prisons. The ambiguous status of Shen Zui’s account raises interesting issues. On the one hand, once he had been successfully declared “re-educated” and had received a special pardon in 1960, by exaggerating the barbarity Juntong could make his own ideological transformation appear all the more heroic and authentic. By the same token, the pardon did grant him license to “tell all,” and he was specifically asked to do so by Zhou Enlai 周恩来. As such, the state’s interest in his personal recollections ceases to be motivated by a need to secure a war-crime conviction against him, but instead becomes motivated by a desire to create an archive of the events surrounding the concentration camps. Shen Zui speant much of the rest of his life fulfilling Zhou’s request, publishing a number of books detailing his personal experiences in the service of Juntong. 沈醉: 敬怀江姐, http://www.Gmw.cn/CONTENT/2005–03/09/ content_193070.htm. 原文 1984 发表于 « 为了孩子» 第6期. 32 James Reeve Pusey has shown how much this kind of zoomorphism is the result of a certain reading of Darwin’s theory of evolution. “Human beings, said Lu Xun ‘got their start as microorganisms’ and then evolved ‘from worms to tigers and leopards, to apes’—to us. But ‘we have kept the nature of worm, and some the nature of an ape.’ Thus spoke Lu Xun. Thus spoke Zarathustra: ‘You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape” ( James Reeve Pusey, Lu Xun and Evolution [Albany: SUNY Press, 1998], 80).

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site of truth, revolutionary spirit must remain forever out of view for the KMT tormentor. What is telling is that the torture the revolutionary endures simply performs in bloody fashion, as brute corporeal fact, the reactionaries’ distance from the historical truth of revolution. For Juntong, the truth they demand from their captive is simply the name and address of a Communist underground comrade. The tortured revolutionary is in a real sense impotent to grant her tormentor a glimpse of the truth. She cannot endow her interrogator with the faculty of vision they constitutionally lack. Just as important as the revolutionary’s ability to withstand the bodily horrors inflicted upon her is the KMT operative’s performance of seeking data whose meaning they could never fully comprehend. The precise whereabouts of an underground party member or the bamboo sliver driven under the fingernail of the revolutionary are contingent pieces of the much larger dialectical struggle whose essence and scope the reactionary fails to grasp. The poem, “My ‘Confession’ ” which Cheng Gang was said to have composed on the spot during his interrogation appeals to a similar logic. No matter how heavy the iron shackles clanging at my feet, No matter how high you raise the whip, I have no confession, Even if a bloodied bayonet is pointed at my breast, A human being cannot lower their noble head, Only a coward begs for your “freedom,”33 What do torture and beatings amount to? Death has no means to open my mouth, I laugh loudly in the face of death, My laughter rocks this palace of demons, This is my—the “confession” of a Communist. I sing the funeral song and bury the Jiang family dynasty.34

The poem exemplifies the absolute distance that separates the revolutionary from the reactionary. Of course, the theme of courageous, implacable defiance marks all such poems, and yet what interests me is how that separation is marked. Freedom is invoked in several ways

33 I have adapted the English translation’s use of “your ‘freedom’ ” because it accurately renders the relative nature of the freedom being disdained by Cheng Gang. 34 Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 177–178.

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in the poem. Initially, it is merely the condition deprived the Communist by his KMT persecutor. In essence, this lack of freedom is on the same level as the sting of the torturer’s whip. It is the unfreedom of a shackled body. Precisely because such an unfreedom is of little moment in the second stanza, the word freedom is placed in scare quotes—a “ziyou 自由” in name only, the mere sound of the concept. By freedom, the reactionary understands only the sense of release from physical constraint—the removal of clanging shackles, and the unlocking of the prison door. The rhetoric of the poem, and so many others like it, poses such values as freedom dialectically. The torture/interoggation encounters display the insubstantial nature of the reactionary’s grasp of freedom. Given the philosophical weight attached to revolution in the novel, it is hardly surprising that the notion of freedom offered up in the novel by Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan is in close accord with Hegel’s discussion of freedom in the Philosophy of Right. In the section on the State, Hegel analyzes the relationship between courage and freedom: The intrinsic worth of courage as a disposition of mind is to be found in the genuine, absolute, final end, the sovereignty of the state. The work of courage is to actualize this final end, and the means to this end is the sacrifice of personal actuality. This form of experience thus contains the harshness of extreme contradictions: a self-sacrifice which yet is the real existence of one’s freedom; the maximum self-subsistence of individuality, yet only as a cog playing its part in the mechanism of an external organization; absolute obedience, renunciation of personal opinions and reasonings, in fact complete absence of mind, coupled with the most intense and comprehensive presence of mind and decision in the moment of acting [. . .]35

Needless to say, the authors of Hongyan clearly subscribed to a Communist withering away of Hegel’s State. As much as their ends are proletarian revolution, we must nonetheless acknowledge how crucial China’s actual sovereignty was as well to the political and ideological struggle the novel describes. Nonetheless, Hegel’s discussion of freedom is precisely what the novel attempts to articulate regarding revolutionary courage. Indeed, the “Additions” (Zusätze) appended to Hegel’s text above point directly to the larger question of how the courage of both

35 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 211.

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Communist revolutionary and KMT spy should be understood. Dai Li’s agents “too have spirit enough to risk their lives,” to quote Hegel’s notes added to the passage above, their acts of courage lack the “higher form” of universality that the revolution demands (212). The differences, however, are substantial. As Wen-Hsin Yeh has shown in his analysis of Dai Li’s appeal to the traditional Chinese martial (wuxia 武侠) ethos, Juntong was formed according to very different principles—ones that explicitly endorsed only half of the dialectical “extreme contradiction”—“complete absence of mind”—Hegel describes above. At the same time that Dai Li dramatized the utmost importance of vertical loyalty to “the Leader” (lingxiu 领袖) Chiang Kai-shek, he discouraged, even within the brotherhood of Special Affairs Department (Tewu Chu 特务处), the formation of horizontal loyalty between comrades. The task of all those in his organization—to act as Chiang’s “eyes, ears, arms, and legs”—was simply to serve the Leader “like dogs and horses serving the needs of their masters” without a mind of their own.36 In the Juntong operative there can be no possibility of “the maximum self-subsistence of individuality” only the “cog playing its part in the mechanism of an external organization.” It is in fact remarkable how Dai Li’s own ideological orientation holds so securely to one side of the dialectical contradiction Hegel details in his treatment of the relationship between courage and freedom. The Juntong ethos is never itself developed thematically in the narrative of the novel, since obvious pride of place was reserved for that of Juntong’s Communist adversaries. But the dialectical logic which consistently emphasizes the universality of the revolutionaries’ cause underscores the equation between the Juntong “disposition of mind” and a moribund feudal political ethic. This in turn becomes one of the key characteristics of the novel. With the Hegelian legacy of Marxism as it was understood in China in the early 1950s, suffering and death itself take on in poems like Cheng Gang’s above the complex thematic import assigned to it by Hegel in his various analyses. The body, as recipient of torture, experiences pain 36 Wen-Hsin Yeh, “Dai Li and the Liu Geqing Affair: Heroism in the Chinese Secret Service During the War of Resistance,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 48, 3. (August 1989): 545–562, 548. Hegel notes as well, “The mettle of an animal or a brigand, courage for the sake of honour, the courage of a knight [ precisely what Yeh’s terms wuxia], these are not true forms of courage. . . . The important thing here is not the personal mettle but aligning oneself with the universal” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 296).

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as the contradiction introduced by the implement of torture—the whip, the bamboo strip, the torturer’s leather-gloved fist,—into the unity of its organism. It is the battle of the body waged on the moral level of the political. Death is the release from this contradiction, and as such it is never sought by the revolutionary subject, for it must serve quite another logic. In the novel, death assumes the role Hegel assigns it in the Phenomenology of Spirit, though it is modified in the relationship between imprisoned revolutionary and his KMT reactionary. In Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, it is the slave that becomes such through fear of losing his life. In the fight to the death between the two subjects, the master emerges victorious because he is willing to risk death. The slave then serves the master with his labor, using it to produce wealth for the master. In Hegel’s dialectic, the slave acquires his power through this labor, and achieves his freedom through it. As the member of the proletariat, the revolutionary subject has already served the role of the slave in the dialectic. It remains to the revolutionary subject to seize the actual freedom its labor has enabled it to realize only implicitly. Death will then play a very similar role, though again, modified somewhat, in the epic struggle between Chinese reactionary feudal fascism and the emerging revolutionary class. The so-called “coward” who fears death does so not simply because he clings to mortal existence, since all must. In Hongyan, (again with typical hyperbole) only the reactionary cringes in fear before death because his demise serves no consciously willed universal end. It is a simple nihility. For the revolutionary, the death that he laughs in the face of is only death as threatened by this captor and as the latter can only understand it. For Xu Pengfei in the Second Department, death is understood as the simple inevitability of mortality, a fate shared by all. Both the revolutionaries and their Juntong persecutors acknowledge death as but another instrument to achieve their respective ends. When torture fails, Xu Pengfei will threaten execution. The revolutionaries themselves re-appropriate their own mortality, threatening the Zhazidong’s prison administration with their own self-inflicted deaths, through hunger strikes as “collective suicide.” The self-inflicted death of the revolutionary can become a price the KMT is unable and unwilling to pay. In the same way, to endure the pain of torture is to re-appropriate it as one’s own. In the Philosophy of Mind, the third book of the Encyclopedia, Hegel speaks to the relationship between mind, whose “essential feature is Liberty,” and the experience of physical pain.

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The Other, the negative, contradiction, disunity, therefore also belongs to the nature of mind. In this disunity lies the possibility of pain. Pain has therefore not reached the mind from the outside as is supposed when it is asked in what manner pain entered into the world. Nor does evil, the negative of absolutely self-existent infinite mind, any more than pain, reach mind from the outside; . . . But mind has to preserve itself in contradiction, and therefore, in pain.37

Of course, the red-hot irons used to scald the interrogated prisoner’s flesh are not the mind’s phantasmic creation. They are a substantial, brute reality. And yet in the agony they produce for the body, the revolutionary recognizes but another form of contradiction that is her own fundamental possession. The act of torture imposes a violent disunity on the revolutionary’s body from without. But in the experience of pain itself, the revolutionary “can keep itself affirmative in this negativity [in this case, the bamboo sliver] and possess its own identity.” In other words, physical suffering is the bodily expression of what is the condition of the subject’s actual freedom. To endure the agonies of torture is then to effectively transform the enemy’s implement of torture into the sign of his weakness, inducing an overwhelming sense of impotence within him. In typically dialectic fashion, each stroke of the torturer’s whip turns around into its opposite, becoming an act of self-flagellation that leaves him exhausted both physically and morally. One of the crucial difficulties in such novels is to find different ways to endow the villains with explicable forms of evil. Simple evil is a useless abstraction, of value in understanding the human condition at best, theologically. It is possible for such characters in socialist realist works to bear clear traces of psychopathology. Not only do they serve a corrupt and moribund ideology, but they are also extremely violent and cruel in that service. The landlord Han Laoliu 韩老六 in Zhou Libo’s Hurricane is a good example. The scene in which he beats to death the Bais’ naked daughter with a whip reveals a kind of sadism that risks becoming a psychopathology rather than an expression of class violence as required by the logic of the narrative. The novel Hongyan goes to considerable lengths to reveal the inner world of the dreaded Xu Pengfei, the “Chief of the Second Department of the Southwest Bureau, concurrently Director of the Security 37 Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 15–16.

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Department.” The authors offer not only a frightening description of his capacity for brutality; they attempt to grasp the nature of his depravity through exploring his fears. Indeed, it is impossible for him to be motivated by anything other than fear and personal greed, given his status as representative of the reactionary class. Xu is located at the very pinnacle of the KMT’s security apparatus. The environment in which he works must be a place of the very darkest inhumanity, a hell beyond all hells. As the KMT has been assigned the historical role in China of a desperate struggle against the emergence of a fully human subject no longer divided against itself in alienation, Xu’s Second Department must be located at the farthest reaches of a still fallen world ruled by the law of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Indeed his lair (chaoxue 巢穴) assumes the figurative form of an enormous spider web, with the Second Department at the center, and he like a giant “poisonous spider” at its sinister core. As human panopticon, the innumerable strands of his vast web stretches out from Chongqing throughout all southwestern China. “He was just working through piles of documents, thinking, writing comments. These documents would in no time at all, become orders, radio waves, operations—would become fresh, dripping blood.”38 The atmosphere is one of a terror so pervasive, Xu himself is in a very particular manner both subject to it and even dependent upon it. What is striking is that the overtly terrifying forms of inhuman torture and the cries of anguish that they produce, provide Xu Pengfei with his only release from his own terror’s grip. Xu Pengfei as the author of so much horror in the lives of so many of the KMT’s foes, must be represented in the novel as having his unique relation to terror as such. Not only must he remain wholly unmoved by the wretched human suffering all around him, he must derive a special satisfaction from it. The authors well understood that it was crucial to articulate this element of Xu’s character precisely in relation to larger existential philosophical economy. Xu’s terror lies immediately in relation to emptiness: For quite a few years, he had been accustomed to this kind of life. If at some point he unexpectedly would no longer hear the howls of those being beaten, he would feel emptiness and terror (kongbu 恐怖). Only

38

Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 104.

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with uninterrupted torture and interrogation was he able to sense his own existence and power.39

What is telling is that Xu’s sadism is not merely a contingent byproduct of his gruesome occupation. He is not merely hardened by the years of inflicting merciless violence upon the political enemies of the KMT. His sheer inhumanity is the direct result of his nihilism—his utter failure to grasp the substantial meaning of Marxism’s “universal truth” ( pubian zhenil 普遍真理) as the revolutionary Li Siyang describes it during his first interrogation at the Second Department after his arrest (209). He is subject to a terrifying, blank negativity, one that takes the form of the Kantian sublime in the novel. In a work so thoroughly imbued with revolutionary heroism, Xu Pengfei cannot be the only one who experiences the sublime, but he must do so in a purely negative manner, as is dictated by what is referred to as his “class instinct” ( jieji benneng 阶级 本能). As a type (dianxing) fashioned through both the epistemological and the artistic process of image thought, Xu Pengfei is necessarily extreme. One could say almost sympathetically that Xu must feel this sublime terror more fully, more absolutely. In the parlance of socialist realist aesthetics, he suffers the sublime more typically than other members of his class. As a typical representative and anti-paragon of a declining class (moluo jieji 没落阶级), Xu senses acutely the yawning abyss of history into which his class is fated to descend. As revolutionary hero, Xu Yunfeng remarks to Chongqing Party Secretary Li Jingyuan regarding the fatuous, soon-to-turn traitor Fu Zhigao: “Such a person is one way to your face, and another behind your back. Criticism has no effect. In the face of the enemy, one can only deal with them resolutely. We have no choice.” Xu Yunfeng thought [for a moment] and responded, “Let this be a lesson. Of course, it is an unavoidable social phenomenon. Ten, even twenty years later, such people may not necessarily have ceased to exist.”40

The likes of Fu Zhigao and Xu Pengfei are sentenced extinction by the laws of history.

Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 104. The term jueji 绝迹, to become extinct, gives a clear sense of the kind of lingering social Darwinism that certainly infected elements of Chinese Marxist thought. The English translation skirts the issue: “There will still be such people ten or twenty years from now” (Luo and Yang, Red Crag, 154). 39 40

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The novel stages a variety of confrontations between different representatives of the classes. With each encounter—always both violent but also highly personal, the reader acquires an ever greater grasp of the vast social and historical forces that are shaping human destiny. As the opening of the novel loudly announces, the waning years of the Chinese civil war are but the harbinger of the emerging global struggle. Page one has announced explicitly that the battles waged between staunch Communists and their KMT oppressors and persecutors that will comprise the next 600 pages play out the stakes of human history.41 All of this adds enormous weight and significance to the face to face encounters between captured underground party member and KMT secret agent. Indeed there are moments in the narrative when each side becomes like a force of nature governing human historical development in the struggle for ultimate supremacy. After captured Communist Xu Yunfeng has just come to rhetorical blows with the KMT Chief Agent Mao Renfeng 毛人凤 over what Xu has boldly threatened as the imminent “annihilation of all reactionaries all over the world, including you lot of special agents suckled and kept (huanyang 豢养) by U.S. Imperialism,” the enraged Mao pauses to reflect, “It is not hard to understand, having been enemies for so many years unavoidably leaves a deep impression.” Xu Pengfei immediately nodded in agreement. But Mao Renfeng then suddenly turned around and once again stared directly at the inviolable Xu Yunfeng. Both remained silent without a word, like before a thunderstorm, as a new clash of swords began to brew.42

The laws that drive human social and historical development saturate all. What Hongyan in particular as a socialist realist novel attempts to accomplish is the vision of reality in which every element can be comprehended in its relation to the vaster project of human liberation and formation. Everything can be analyzed, cognized and evaluated according to its participation in the unfolding of the human project. There are no degrees of participation: everything participates absolutely. But there are clearly relative degrees of strength and weakness. The very theory of types which the novel itself deploys articulates this principle clearly. The notion of a type (dianxing) is not merely an artistic device The barefoot newspaper boy ran about in the fog shouting: “Where is China heading in 1948? . . . “Read about the U.S. nuclear military exercises, World War III is about to break out . . .” (Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 1). 42 Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 203. 41

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or principle, it is an aesthetic reflection of the epistemological process which first discovers and forms them. The figure of Mao Renfeng expresses the profoundly intimate, if necessarily violent relation, KMT and CCP share. If they are mortal enemies, they are also radically estranged brothers of the dialectic. Their relation is implicitly one of unity—Sun Yat-sen’s KMT and the experience of Whampoa Military academy in which Chiang Kai-shek is Commandant and Zhou Enlai was Deputy Director of the Political Department. They must be one and yet at the same time dialectically posed in such contradiction that the ideological and historical spaces they each inhabit must be separated absolutely and it falls to the revolutionaries to install that separation as universality. Negativity opens up a fissure between them that must widen into an historical abyss that will forever and completely separate them, as the rising revolutionary class buries the reactionary oppressor class. Nothing more completely expresses this than Xu Yunfeng’s categorical assertion that “we”—the KMT and the CCP—possess no common language: “We communists and yourselves have no common language whatsoever (meiyou renhe gongtong yuyan 没有任何共同语言).” The universality of language still obtains, and yet in another sense the ideological and historical distance that separates them is now so great, Xu Yunfeng can only speak words which are at best superficially coherent for his KMT listeners, since they remain words whose significance they fail utterly to grasp. The revolutionaries have long since begun to inhabit an ideological and historical space whose substance differs so radically from that of their enemies. They will speak of things—feelings, sentiments, ideas, etc. that Second Department’s (Erchu 二处) functionaries are powerless to understand. In name only do they comprehend what is meant by such terms as “proletarian comradeship” ( jieji youai 阶级友爱).43 Watching captives Xu Yunfeng and Cheng Gang “reunite” in the confines of Erchu, Xu Pengfei wonders if the obvious warmth between them is “proletarian comradeship.” As master of counterinsurgency intelligence Xu is conversant in the vocabulary of his ideological adversaries. The logic of the narrative requires that his familiarity with such terms remains glancing and formal at best. What they signify as concepts is

43 The English version of the novel correctly translates jieji youai as “proletarian comradeship” rather than “class comradeship” since in the context of the narrative this unique sentiment is understood to exist only within the revolutionary ranks.

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clear enough. It is the experience itself of a deep and abiding sense of fraternity with a member of the same rising revolutionary class that is forever beyond Xu Pengfei’s reach. It is an alien experience, and the text uses scare quotes to highlight its utter remoteness as a possible emotional experience, whose intensity the narration terms a “raging affection” (kuanglie de ganqing 狂烈的感情). Pengfei, must be literally unable to believe his very eyes. The profound emotional connection forged by revolutionary class solidarity is misrecognized, even as he struggles to perceive it. Instead, because the substantial significance of the term “proletarian comradeship” is so purely inaccessible to him, Pengfei can perceive only an organizational, bureaucratic, formal, hierarchical relationship between Xu Yunfeng and Cheng Gang. He believes that this display of deep mutual affection is the simple result of a personal intimacy forged by the organizational dictates of underground party work. Having just witnessed the brutally tortured semi-conscious Cheng Gang being so overwhelmed at meeting his comrade Xu Yunfeng that he passes out, the narrative focalizes Xu Pengfei’s moment of misrecognition: Xu Yunfeng and Cheng Gang were unexpectedly this intimate. Could this be that special “proletarian comradeship” that the communists were said to possess? Unless they had a deeper relationship, otherwise how could merely a past superior/subordinate relationship result in such raging affection. He suddenly became conscious of the fact that in Cheng Gang’s words a secret had been revealed. “You will never capture my leader.” However, as soon as he had seen Xu Yunfeng, he was immediately so moved that he lost consciousness! This proves it: Xu Yungfeng is still leading Cheng Gang. Yes, didn’t Xu Yunfeng just say: “I have led Cheng Gang, such a staunch comrade-in-arms.” Then Xu Yunfeng must also have been in charge of the Tingjinbao 挺进报.44

Of course, Pengfei’s captives are eminently capable of capitalizing tactically upon his error. Xu Yunfeng’s powerful insight (he has already perceived the emptiness that haunts Pengfei) and revolutionary acumen enable him to grasp instinctively his KMT persecutor’s befuddlement and he is quick to seize upon it. The play of opposites and contradictions is in full force in this passage. Where the historically unprecedented and unique emotional experience of an intense affection and solicitude was forged solely among the ranks of the insurgent revolutionaries, Pengfei’s

44

Luo and Yang, Hongyan 130.

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own class instincts enable him to sense it only dimly, though primarily as an entry in the lexicon of counter-insurgency intelligence gathering. He finally can see only what the profound limitations of his class experience impose upon him, namely a strictly personal relationship formed by a modern, bureaucratic relation. In truth, however, such a pure feeling of solidarity is precisely what causes the wounded Cheng Gang to faint dead away at the sight of his comrade Xu Yunfeng. Once Pengfei has asserted the false and incorrect claim that it is the Tingjinbao that binds Xu Yunfeng organizationally to Cheng in the party underground’s activity, Yunfeng immediately “confesses” to precisely this “in order to shield both the Party organization and Li Jingyuan’s [Cheng Gang’s actual superior] safety.” One might simply say that wherever there is truth, Xu Pengfei cannot perceive it. Confronted with the truth of the relationship between Xu and Cheng Gang, Pengfei’s formidable intelligence and savvy fail him. But the crux of his misrecognition here is more telling, since his failure is one determined by the absolute divide that separates him from his adversaries. In his world, the bonds between spymaster and subordinate can surely be as intense, personal, and even passionate, but as a merely feudal “wuxia” mentality. The emotional bind that ties the special services men of the KMT together is a purely contingent event, formed only in the service of the much larger political project of repression. The oppressor class [ yapo jieji ] puts the power of such fraternal bonds into service of the cause of stifling any true solidarity within the proletariat. Though the personal feeling of connection may be just as intense, it emerges in a strictly instrumental manner. Juntong operatives may willingly die for one another and for their bosses.45 What differs so radically with the “proletarian comradeship” between revolutionary comrades is that it is not a mere prerequisite for the success of the revolution. Rather, it is the direct expression of a higher form of fraternal bond whose ends of universal human liberation are fully in accord with its essence. Again, the emotional difference between the fraternal bond among revolutionaries and that between Juntong special agents is not quantitative, only qualitative. The real difference is that for the communist revolutionary the intensity of that relation can be experienced as ontologically necessary to membership within the proletariat. For the Juntong agent, the experience of personal solidarity with colleagues stands in the most

45

See Wen-Hsin Yeh’s article quoted above.

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extreme contradiction to the ends it serves for it can be experienced only in the operation of repression. Indeed, for the reactionary agents the bond of loyalty is so strong that even existence itself must become impossible beyond the task of political repression.46 For Hongyan’s communist, a world is to be created in which that natural solidarity that binds proletarian/t to proletarian/t can be lived explicitly and fully in all forms of human praxis. The bloody confrontation between revolutionary and Juntong torturer is but a stage in the struggle. After liberation, this intense feeling of comradeship was supposed to pervade all areas of the new society, from the agricultural collective to the factory floor. It was supposed to maintain itself in peacetime and in the absence of any aggressor to take up arms against. In short, “proletarian comradeship” was supposed to be the true realization of human bonds formed in the service of truly human ends. It could not be the merely contingent byproduct of men and women thrown together under the terrifying roar of an artillery barrage.47 In principle, once the true social and historical nature of the struggle for global proletariat has been cognitively grasped, solidarity can exist completely “in the World.”48 What passes for “class solidarity” in the capitalist class is something qualitatively different. “Solidarity” such as it exists emerges solely as a prerequisite for continued domination of the proletariat.

“Service in Dai Li’s secret police was, in effect, a lifetime term. Once you became a member of the SSD, or what was eventually called the Military Statistics Bureau [ Juntong], you were never dismissed, nor could you resign from that position. If a person even asked for Dai Li’s permission to retire, he or she risked being clapped into confinement indefinitely. Agents told each other, ‘The comrades [tongzhi 同志] in the organization come in when they’re alive and only leave when they’re sleeping in their coffins’ ” (Wakeman, Dai Li, 220). 47 The zeal one finds in the facial expression of the stevedore in the Cultural Revolution model opera Haigang 海港 (On the Dock) represents this well. In Haigang, there is an intense battle underway involving the shipment of grain to Africa. Counterrevolutionaries have engaged in acts of sabotage. Despite the apparently high stakes of this venture, Africa cannot help seeming remote from the day-to-day workings of the shipping port. This model opera sought to depict that revolutionary enthusiasm in the workplace. 48 Soldiers in Vietnam and in Iraq experienced the profound connection with their fellow soldiers in arms, and yet that bond can find no functional, public manifestation off the battlefield. Once “stateside” the soldier is “back in the World,” the expression commonly used by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam to describe life back home. The overwhelming sense of fraternal connection among such soldiers became an otherwordly experience. 46

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In this vital sequence of scenes, China itself fades to the background and is not mentioned once in these pages. The world as a shijie datong 世界大同 in emergence begins to coalesce dialectically according to the regular laws of historical development. Xu Yunfeng and Cheng Gang’s KMT captors will try consistently to interrupt, defer, and diffuse the sheer contradiction between them. In Hongyan, nothing is more lethal to the oppressor class than the continued working of dialectical negativity. From the perspective of the Juntong spymasters and their special agents, the arrest and interrogation of underground party members is understood merely as intelligence data collection. They are unwittingly compelled to sow the seeds of their own destruction through what appears to them as their tactical successes against their communist adversaries. Viewed from the vantage of Juntong, imprisonment is a form of privation, and torture is an excess of pain to be suffered. From the perspective of the Luo and Yang’s revolutionary, the dialectic is fed with the blood of sacrificed martyrs, whose suffering and death sow the “seeds of revenge” (baochou de huozhong 报仇的火种). The KMT serves the functional role of spreading the “seeds of fire” in its own violent wake. According to the logic that governs the novel, the KMT is merely fulfilling the role assigned to it by history. Their actions must then assume the quality of “class instinct.” The negativity that animates the dialectic must be brought directly into the innermost recesses of Erchu’s bloodspattered halls. A revolutionary must therefore embrace the opportunity to engage the enemy there even if it means subjecting one’s body to the most sadistic of tortures. Indeed, so uniform is the necessity of transforming every element of one’s daily practice into an act of whose ultimate end is revolutionary insurgency—no matter what the occupation, frontline soldier or nursery attendant—that the trials of tortured body become merely relative. Thus, equally dangerous and arduous forms of struggle exist that do not involve torture.49 For the KMT, the revolutionary captive must at all costs be removed as a term in the dialectic, even if the dialectic itself that is to serve their undoing is never comprehended, as such. This can be accomplished through various means. Pengfei first attempts to persuade Xu Yunfeng When Xu Yunfeng is hauled at gunpoint before the “guests” assembled in honor of his imminent release on orders from Nanjing, Xu reflects that having to cope with this staged banquet is even more painful than the “clash of swords of the torture and interrogation room.” 49

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that his willingness to let his subordinate be tortured and executed displays all the brutal callousness of the feudal mindset the CCP claims to wage total war against: Under these circumstances, even if you give no thought to your own welfare, you must still immediately save the life of your comrade. You are too cruel, really, much too cruel. For the sake of your own reputation, you wouldn’t hesitate to give up the lives of countless subordinates, using the lives of others to preserve your strength, using the blood of others in exchange for a moment of capriciousness. ‘A general’s reputation is built with 10,000 corpses 一将功成万骨枯.’ Who would have thought that such feudal thinking would manifest itself on the person of Xu Yunfeng, the self-styled communist (172).

Pengfei hopes that what he has vaguely sensed as a “proletarian comradeship” between Xu and Cheng might serve as a lever into Xu’s conscience, such that he would never allow his subordinate to suffer further at the hands of Pengfei’s executioners. Pengfei asserts a clear measure of historical distance between himself as the member of China’s presumably modern Nationalist Party and the militarist feudal ethos he accuses Xu Yunfeng of embodying. Precisely for this reason, the accusation serves a much greater purpose in the narrative than a mere taunt or futile attempt at manipulating Xu’s conscience and humanity. Pengfei interprets Xu’s apparent willingness to stand by and watch his comrade Cheng Gang die in the only way he knows how, according to the only moral logic he can understand. Pengfei’s impotent taunt is meant in the narrative to underscore just how thoroughly incomprehensible the moral universe of his communist enemies is. Of course, within the larger context of the narrative, the obvious irony is that Pengfei’s description of Xu Yunfeng is far more an unwitting confession that the KMT’s own martial ethos was an amalgam of both the modern and the feudal. His description of the world marks the limit of his understanding of it, and in so doing, that narrative again underscores the absolute scission worked by the revolutionaries’ claim to universality. As Hongyan continually reminds its readers, it is the arduous and bloody process through which this universality is imposed by the Zhazidong’s communist prisoners both upon and against their captors that constitutes the core of this novel as a revolutionary Bildungsroman. What is oddly most compelling about narratives like Hongyan is precisely this distance—the abyss that must come to divide absolutely the forces of insurrection from the given social order and all the forces of reactionary violence that seek to preserve that order.

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The Aporia of Modern Chinese Revolutionary Subjectivity It is on this count that Hongyan figures most fully the modern formation of the revolutionary subject in relation to Hegelian negativity. Here it will be helpful to tie together several earlier concerns, in particular, Cai Yi’s notion of social class in the formation of artistic types and the universality they affirm in the work of art. Nowhere are these problems more apparent in Hongyan than in its treatment of Liu Siyang, who, I noted earlier, comes closest to offering the reader the kind of narrative arc of individual development we most often associate with the Bildungsroman. Liu Siyang differs from the other revolutionaries not simply in terms of his petty bourgeois class origin, but also by virtue of the fact that of all the major figures in the novel, he is the only one whose revolutionary Bildung is presented in focalized narrative detail for the reader. Though a member of the Party underground, his arrest along with his fiancé Sun Mingxia 孙明霞 lands both in the Zhazidong, and for the first time in his life he is forced to endure the most extreme privations. As I noted earlier, nearly all of the other political prisoners we encounter in the Zhazidong are professional revolutionaries with many years of experience waging insurrection against the KMT. Along with the extraordinary physical abuse—torture, hunger, and thirst—Liu must initially endure as well agonizing doubts about his own ability to preserve his integrity as a revolutionary. This psychological burden appears to the reader all the more onerous since the only other example of an underground Party member of bourgeois origins is Fu Zhigao, whose arrest and immediate capitulation to his Juntong captors on only the threat of torture sets in motion the collapse of the Party underground network in Chongqing and the arrest of Cheng Gang, Jiang Jie, Xu Yunfeng, and both Liu Siyang and Sun Mingxia.50 During his first interrogation at the hands of Xu Pengfei, Liu Siyang elaborates matter of factly on his theoretical grasp of the vast historical and political forces shaping the world events: “At University I studied 50 This sequence of events is called into question in a more recent Liberation Daily ( Jiefang ribao) report. The article quotes former Chongqing Party underground member Li Weijia, who claims that in fact the collapse of the Party underground in 1948 in Chongqing and Sichuan was not related to the “Tingjinbao affair,” but rather to a series of defections by important Party leaders, beginning with Liu Guoding (刘国定) and Ran Yizhi (冉益智). See Zhang Aijing, “Countless historical errors clearly exist in Party History Novel ‘Hongyan’,” Liberation Daily, January 30, 2004. 张爱敬, “ ‘党史 小说’ « 红岩» 明显存在不少史实讹误,” 解放日 报, 2004–1–30.

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various theories of political economy. Only finally in materialist philosophy, “Das Kapital,” and the laws of the social development of the human race, did I discover the truth that only the proletariat is the revolutionary class with the greatest prospects and only it can bring about total liberation and universal brotherhood (shijie datong).”51 Like all full-fledged members of the Communist Party, Liu takes seriously the demand for a rigorous theoretical grasp of Marxism-Leninism. And yet, the novel is equally explicit about the fact that what is at stake is the degree of ethical commitment to universality that imposes the most extreme physical and spiritual demands upon its adherents. Precisely for this reason, the Zhazidong and the Baigongguan as sites whose sole purpose is incarceration, torture, and ideological battle are ideal for figuring the formation of revolutionary subjectivity. From the perspective of the revolutionaries, there is nothing merely punitive in the treatment they suffer at the hands of the Juntong. The purpose of the concentration camps is to wage total war on the subjective will of the incarcerated.52 As proletarian-identified, the bourgeois-born Liu more visibly manifests the type of negation of one’s origins that indeed that modern political subjectivity demands. Indeed, Liu’s purpose in the novel is more than anything to present a critique of the kind of class essentialism that was so pervasive after Liberation. And yet, as we will see, the status of this critique is ultimately equivocal, since his example poses a threat to the very logic of modern political subjectivity he is meant to represent as an artistic type. For what Liu seems to accomplish by transcending his class origins and learning to identify with what should be by right his class enemy, the proletariat, is in fact integral to the self-conscious class identifications of all the revolutionaries in the novel. As such, his revolutionary Bildung in the novel produces a strong tendency to render immediately natural and substantial what must of necessity remain wholly mediated by subjective will, namely, one’s conscious choice to

Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 209. After his arrival at the Baigongguan, Liu notes the “reactionary slogans” plastered on the wall exhorting the inmates to purge themselves Marxist-Leninist ideology with the “Three People’s Principles.” “Train your mind with the Three People’s Principles,” “Model your actions on Three People’s Principles to model your actions,” “Confine your discourse to the Three People’s Principles, ( yi sanmin zhuyi yueshu yanlun 以三 民主义约束言论)” . . . “Unity of Thought!,” “Eradicate Marxism-Leninism with the Three People’s Principles!” (Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 387. I have modified the English translation, Luo and Yang, Red Crag, 377). 51 52

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identify oneself as a member of a particular social grouping, in this case social class. It is in many ways hardly surprising that this process was perhaps no where in 20th-century Asia more comprehensively elaborated than in Japan. As Naoki Sakai has shown in an article entitled “Subject and Substratum: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism,” the Kyoto School philosopher, Tanabe Hajime during the 1930s and 1940s undertook a philosophical analysis of the problem of how ethnic colonial subjects from all parts of the Japanese empire could serve in the Japanese Imperial army and, by doing so, affirm for themselves the right to full participation in the political life of the State—including the right to rebel against it.53 As Sakai explains in his critical analysis of Tanabe’s Logic of Species, Therefore, it is clearly stated that the individual belongs to a social grouping as a result of his wishing to belong to it and that the individual’s belonging to the nation, for instance, [membership in the revolutionary proletariat being Hongyan’s instance], must be ‘mediated’ by his freedom. One can identity onself with the country because of the freedom for one not to do so is also available. Only by giving up the possibility of not identifying with or separating oneself from the nation can one gain one’s belonging to it. So, in order to belong to it, one must chose to give up the possibility of not belonging to it.54

What is crucial here for our purposes is that the “imperial nationalism” of Tanabe’s Logic of Species is fundamentally premised on the recognition that “no body among the Japanese nation is, naturally and immediately, Japanese (471).” One’s membership in a modern social grouping, such as the nation or social class is therefore mediated by negativity, namely the subject’s negation/refusal of its immediate, unreflective, participation in the community into which the individual is born. Absent the individual’s self-conscious recognition of its community and his fully conscious choice to subject himself to the ethical 53 Naoki Sakai, “Subject and Substratum: Japanese Imperial Nationalism,” Cultural Studies, 14,3 ( July 2000); 462–530, 469. Sakai notes that “[ b]y 1943, a large number of young men in Taiwan and Korea had been recruited as soldiers for Japanese military forces through ‘volunteer’ recruitment systems which were replaced by conscription in 1944 in both Korea and Taiwan.” Sakai is careful to add, “Let us not forget what was meant by the voluntary nature of this ‘volunteer’ recruitment. As is well-known, around the same time many young men of Japanese ancestry ‘volunteered’ to serve in the United States army in order to get out of concentration camps on the other side of the Pacific” (473). 54 Sakai, “Subject and Substratum,” 470, italics in original.

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and social demands of that community, the community itself would not properly exist for the subject. Put another way, an individual who never achieves fully self-conscious awareness of his community fails to achieve subjectivity.55 Hongyan affirms this logic of negativity as well as the demand that the individual assume the full substance of his revolutionary subjectivity solely on the basis of his freely chosen decision to align himself with the proletariat. The following exchange beween Xu Pengfei and Liu Siyang, which the latter sitting in a prison cell recollects to himself after his arrest, makes this clear: The third son of a bourgeois family becomes a Communist? You have food, clothing, material pleasures—what is the point of getting involved in politics? How had [Liu] responded? Of course—by coldly lifting his head back and looking the spymaster over once. The strategy of the CCP is to use the sons of families of substantial social position for propaganda purposes in order to extend its influence. It is hardly remarkable that immature and ignorant young people who are unhappy with the world find themselves used by others . . . “Who is using me? No one can use me? I am free to believe in communism!” He had never heard anything so absurd. He could not bear to let either the Party or himself suffer such a slur. Of course, he must loudly protest against the spy’s empty bluster. Faith? Doctrines? All empty talk! The Communists talk about class, but what class are you? Your elder brother gave up an official post to become a business man, opening up stores in Chongqing and Shanghai selling Sichuan medicinal herbs. With such wealth, is he not a capitalist? With your class origin, your ideology and lifestyle, aren’t you a likely target of the Party’s ‘Three Checkups-Three Rectifications’ campaign. I have examined quite a few Communist Party documents. Should the Communists succeed, do you really think the Liu family will be able to keep their wealth and property? Don’t you think that as a Party member of impure class origins (chushen buchun 出身不纯) you risk being kicked out of the Party? Since ancient times, countless doctrines have come and gone, only those who have accommodated themselves to the reality of their times have succeeded (识时务者为俊杰). I urge you to study carefully the ‘Three People’s Principles’ . . .56

55 “Not being autonomous, the individual unwittingly would do what it is accustomed to doing. It would simply obey given dictates and not be conscious of any gap between what ought to be and what is. For such an individual, therefore, the species is not a reality but a transparent irrelevancy” (Sakai, “Subject and Substratum,” 480). 56 Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 209.

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Tellingly, Liu is initially bewildered by Xu’s treatment of him and wonders why he has not been immediately tortured like the others who were arrested with him. The narrator interposes, informing the reader that Xu’s willingness to reason with Liu was due to two simple facts: first, that Liu’s family had already offered Xu “gold bars” ( jintiao 金条) in return for his release, and second, because it was simply beyond Xu’s powers of comprehension to understand how a “young intellectual from such a wealthy family background could ever become a true communist (209).” All that Liu is aware of is that he and Xu share not a shred of “class feeling ( jieji ganqing 阶级感情) (209).” In other words, it is a measure of Xu Pengfei’s inability to fully grasp the essence of modern subjective identity that he is compelled to believe that “class origin” is finally decisive as regards the individual’s political (or national) identifications.57 Sakai offers a helpful gloss for Xu’s failure on this count: “The belonging to a species [or class] does not mean to be in it factually or to be merely born into it; to belong to it is to transform it according to the dictates of universal humanity.”58 There can be no doubt whatsoever that according to the logic of Hongyan’s narrative, Xu Pengfei’s “social praxis,” is at the very furthest remove from the “dicatates of universal humanity.” What is significant here is Liu’s fundamental assertion that his moral autonomy categorically excludes the possibility that he could ever be used by any party or ideology. His “faith” in communism is mediated purely by freedom.59 It is in this precise sense that Liu as a fully modern revolutionary subject can lay claim to Marxism-Leninism as a “universal truth.” It is vital at this point to clarify what this assertion of universality means, since its actual meaning and significance would be lost if we were to collapse the actual Chinese Communist Party as headed by Mao Zedong on the eve of Liberation with universally realized truth, as such. One’s commitment to a cause, such as Liu’s communism, cannot be premised on the Party’s demand or orders.

57 What is true about fully developed class identification would likewise be true of Chinese as national subjects, as well. Sakai writes, “According to Tanabe, my belonging to community becomes an issue for my self-awareness only when I act to disagree or disobey such a custom, thereby risking fragmentation and division of that community. In other words, I do not belong to that community naturally because of my birth or an[y] other innate accident but, only when I try to negate and change it will I belong to it (Sakai, “Subject and Substratum,” 487). 58 Sakai, “Subject and Substratum,” 489. 59 “信仰共产主义是我的自由!” (Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 208).

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One must surely follow the Party’s orders and one must even be perfectly willing to give up one’s life doing so. But as a revolutionary subject, Liu’s practical orientation toward struggle is governed by a principle that radically transcends any immediate, given historical instantiation of the Chinese Communist Party and its policies. The logic that governs Liu Siyang’s execution of his duty to the Party is what Tanabe identifies as the genus (rui, or lei 类 in Chinese). Sakai writes, Through devotion to the State and by risking his own life, a man acquires a right to rebel against the State; what the individual aspires to realize even by risking his own life is not the factual content of the State’s order or rule but an idea whose validity goes beyond the existing State and which, at least in principle, is true and just for entire humanity. This is why the individual’s act of devoting himself to the State must be understood to imply not only the movement of the individual’s identification with the State but also the movement of the individual’s act to pull the State toward some universal principle beyond the existing State.60

If, as Mao Zedong was so often quoted as saying, “it is right to rebel,” (zaofan youli 造反有理) then it is only as a revolutionary subject in this sense described Tanabe, namely as an act guided by an idea or principle that the subject takes to be universally applicable for humanity as such.61 Xu Pengfei places himself entirely outside of this sphere of ethical action when he proclaims to Liu Siyang that the only persons of truly exceptional talent in history were those whose practice is governed solely by the expedient willingness to accommodate themselves to whichever social and political reality presents itself to them, regardless of its moral composition—what Xu Pengfei has invoked as those who “accommodate themselves to the reality of their times.”62

Sakai, “Subject and Substratum,” 469, italics my own. It is likewise axiomatic that one can never know the ultimate consequence of one’s act, that may in fact lead to one’s death. This is compellingly illustrated in Marc Rothemund’s 2005 film, Sophie Scholl—The Last Days. The film offers a remarkably sparse and understated recounting of the arrest, trial, and execution in 1943 of Munich University student Sophie Scholl. Scholl was the member of the anti-Nazi student resistance group White Rose. She was arrested along with her brother Hans Scholl and Christoph Probst, both of whom were also executed. 62 Sakai links Tanabe’s Logic of Species directly to the form of “subjective technology” Foucault defines as “pastoral.” Furthermore, Sakai very pointedly warns against too glib a dismissal of Tanabe’s work despite the obviously horrific consequences that have always attended “every nation-state’s” demand that individuals be willing to both “kill and die” for it. No modern nation-state has escaped this logic. “Certainly one can denounce the Logic of Species because it entrusted the death of the individual with the sovereignty of the State, but such an accusation would sound like a piece of Romantic 60

61

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It is perhaps now easier to see why Liu Siyang is a problematic example of the formation of revolutionary subjectivity. He fulfills the task only too well because he is willing to countenance a total ethical separation between himself and the world he was born into and voluntarily affirms that separation in the form of what Tanabe termed the “anticipatory resolution towards one’s death (kesshi no gimu, 決死の 義務).”63 The difficulty lies in the fact that the separation the proletarian must install between herself and her natal community is no less absolute for one of working-class birth, precisely because the demand that one align one’s actions with the “dictates of universal humanity” is the same, regardless of one’s initial class background. Jiang Jie’s acts of resistance—her willingness to be tortured and executed rather than “confess” the identities of her comrades in the Underground—cannot derive from any accident of birth. Indeed, strictly speaking, any act that derived from mere contingency of proletarian or ethnic/national natality, would to a certain degree compromise the generic human universality the act is meant finally to affirm. Certainly the enormous popularity of both Song of Youth and Red Crag derived in large part from the fact that they both figured educated youth of “impure class origin.” Lin Daojing and Liu Siyang could both furnish exemplary models of the heroic revolutionaries whose bourgeois class origins were not finally decisive. As Liu Siyang states matter-offactly to an uncomprehending Xu Pengfei, “One’s class origin does not decide everything (阶 级 出 身 不 能 决 定 一 切)”.64 The example of Liu Siuyang is therefore troublingly equivocal since on the one hand it clearly militates against “class essentialism.” On the other hand, it risks serving the very logic it wishes to undermine by suggesting that the petty bourgeois intellectual’s acquisition of and claim to revolutionary subjectivity is of a fundamentally different order than that achieved by a member of the working class or a peasant, demanding an even more robust and heroic negation of their class background. The logic of

nostalgia for some pre-modern social formation in which the individual’s death has yet to be appropriated from religions by the nation-state. Without this appropriation of the individual’s death by the national community, however, neither national conscription nor popular sovereignty would have been possible” (Sakai, “Subject and Substratum,” 515). I take it that what Sakai means by “popular sovereignty” here would include both modern revolutions, as well as anti-colonial struggles of national liberation. 63 Sakai, “Subject and Substratum,” 468. 64 Luo and Yang, Hongyan, 209.

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modern universality, however, affords no such quantitative relativization of what constitutes the formation of revolutionary subjectivity. Conclusion Modern literary criticism’s effort to delimit the genre of the Bildungsroman has been so continually beset with failure that Redfield adopts the term “phantom” to describe its actual status in literary criticism.65 For Redfield, the seemingly endless series of difficulties and aporias that have attended the literary institution’s effort to clarify the nature—indeed prove the very existence of—the genre of the Bildungsroman is ultimately exemplary of criticism’s relation to literature itself. Redfield’s book is thus not devoted to answering finally the question of whether or not the genre actually exists. Rather, his interest lies in showing that the modern institution of literary study’s critical grappling with this spectral genre sheds light on modern literature’s complex investment in not only aesthetics but also in larger concerns that extend directly into what constitutes the political in modernity. For in the Bildungsroman, one discovers the “infinitely inflatable question of the aesthetic.”66 As the example of Hongyan reveals, that inflation extends directly to all that we mean by the terms humanity and history, but just as crucially to the modern institution of literary study itself (viii). Readers who have followed the discussion up to this point will no doubt recognize the degree to which the formation of modern Chinese literary realism became complexly entwined in what it took to be the historical unfolding and realization of universal humanity. As I have argued in preceding chapters, what Redfield terms the “inflation of the aesthetic” in relation to both literature and the modern institution of criticism plays a decisive role in both the development of modern Chinese literature as well as the institutions that were formed to study it, in China and in the West. Furthermore, what this should suggest is that socialist realist novels as Bildungsromane are fraught with many of

65 Redfield adopts the term from Jeffrey Sammon’s article, “The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman; or What Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy?” Genre 14 (1981): 229–246. Redfield quotes Sammons, who asks if there exists any “legend of literary history . . . so lacking in foundation and so misleading as the phantom of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman[.](229)” 66 Redfield, Phantom Formations, viii.

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the same problems Redfield’s otherwise excellent account details. In conclusion, I would like first to underscore several of these points. It is essential to keep in mind the analogy Redfield notes between “narratives of subject-formation” and “narratives of universal history”—an analogy that grants to aesthetics precisely the formidable investment in the political that we have always understood as the dominant (or dominating) feature of Chinese socialist realist novels. In such novels as Red Crag and Song of Youth, these two types of narrative combine and cross-fertilize one another in extraordinary ways. I have sought to provide an account of the deeply and overtly political nature of Chinese socialist artistic production as a whole by analyzing that problem more broadly in light of global formation of the modern institution of literature. By doing so, we can perhaps better understand the somewhat odd mismatch between the claims, on the one hand, of socialist realism’s champions and its widespread popularity in China, especially before the Cultural Revolution and, on the other hand, the long-standing posture toward it in the West of critical neglect punctuated by bouts of outright hostility. For in a very real sense, to decry the overtly political nature of socialist realism was in a specific way to misunderstand it. Importantly for my purposes here, that misunderstanding was the inevitable result of the failure to recognize the extent to which aesthetic ideology forms the very core of the modern concept of literature and the institution of modern (Chinese) literary studies in the West. As such, I have argued that there is much more than either the mere instrumentalization of the aesthetic or reduction of literature to a mouthpiece of politics at work in Chinese socialist realism’s frank embrace of the political. The variety of subjective technology to which socialist realism lays claim remains very much in evidence in both contemporary China and the humanities in the Western academy.67 In order to better understand how the “inflation of aesthetics” draws Chinese socialist realist novels out into the full glare of what constitutes

67 Redfield connects the modern notion of Bildung directly to Foucault’s “disciplining” of subjects: “Exemplary or aesthetic pedagogy occurs not just as metanarrative, but as the concrete and microscopic practices we sum up as the civilization or socialization of the self. The institutions responsible for Bildung in this sense would include the nuclear family, the schools, and certain forms of mass media as well as the university; and as [Friedrich] Kittler suggests, the institution of literature has a central role to play in this scenario; not just as a discourse exemplary of national or ethnic identity, but as a pedagogical instrument central to the production of “individuals” on all levels of the socialization process” (Redfield, Phantom Formations, 51n 21).

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the political in modernity, it will be helpful here in my conclusion to rehearse briefly the rich etymological origin of the term Bildungsroman. For as I have argued throughout this book (and especially in the chapters on Cai Yi), the problem of the image/figure is of paramount importance in the emergence of modern Chinese realism and socialist realism. Redfield notes especially how Gadamer’s careful analysis of the term in Truth and Method underscores how the English translation of Bildung as “formation” relies on the Latin, formatio. German likewise has Formierung and Formation, both of which contended for a time with the term Bildung. Gadamer continues: Yet the victory of the word Bildung over “form” does not seem to be fortuitous. For in Bildung there is Bild. The idea of “form” lacks the mysterious ambiguity of Bild, which can mean both Nachbild (“image,” “copy”) and Vorbild (“model”).68

In the early 1940s when Feng Zhi 冯至 translated Goethe’s canonical Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship into Chinese, he used the term xiuyang xiaoshuo 修养小说 in his introduction to describe the novel. While Bildungsroman is now generally translated as chengzhang xiaoshuo 成 長小说, Feng Zhi’s use of the word xiuyang captures the something of the sense of inward self-formation Gadamer notes in the word Bildung and avoids misleading jiaoyu xiaoshuo 教育小说, novel of education. No doubt the term tended to be avoided because of its Neo-Confucian connotations.69 In Gadamer’s explanation of the term “Bild,” we can sense some of the philosophical resources that sustain the connection between the concepts of the xingxiang and dianxing in Cai Yi’s aesthetics. The Chinese xingxiang that can translate into English as “image,” “form,” or “figure,” translates into German as “Bild.” Furthermore, the German Vorbild translates the Chinese “dianxing,” which, in turn, likewise serves as the Chinese rendering of Typus. In short, nearly all of what comprise the essential philosophemes of modern global literary eidaesthetics circulates around the modern Chinese usages of the terms xiangxiang and dianxing as they were deployed in Chinese Marxist aesthetics and criticism.

Quoted in Redfield, Phantom Formations, 47. Xu Wei, “A Summary Overview of 20th Century Research on the Bildungsroman, Contemporary Fiction: Part One,” (2007:1). 徐 渭, “20 世 纪 成 长 小说研究 综述(一)”当代小说(上半月)» 2007 年 第 1 期. 68 69

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As I argued in chapter two, the discourse of national character as articulated initially by Arthur K. Smith formed precisely in relation to this notion of the Bild as the image of God. For the American missionary, this image was meant to supplant the inward nihility which marked the absence of the Chinese soul. I have argued in this book that especially leftist Chinese writers assimilated the category of image into a post-Feuerbachian Marxist emphasis upon the species-being of the human (Gattungswesen des Menschen). In my earlier discussion of Cai Yi, I showed—marked first by the political polarities of “left” and “right”—powerfully shaped the mid-20th century preoccupation with the philosophical aesthetic concept of the type (dianxing, Typus). If for Lacoue-Labarthe Freud’s Oedipus was one of the types (LacoueLabarthe uses the terms “figure” and “example” as synonyms here) which “Western humanity models itself on,” then surely the other was “the worker,” such as Lu Xun first encountered it while translating Artsybashev’s “The Worker Shevyrev”: The first of these figures is the older and obviously the more powerful in terms of its social, political and historical effects: the figure of the worker, in the sense in which it was expressly designated and thematized by Ernst Jünger, but also in the sense that it is supported by the entire social metaphysics of the nineteenth century, and especially by the thought of Marx in its entirety. Under its influence or impact, the essence of humanity—humanitas—recognizes itself, understands itself and tries to realize itself as the subject of production (the modern poiesis) in general or as the subject of energy in the strict sense: energy that is applied and put to work. In this figure, “man” is represented as worker.70

As we have seen the “essence of the human,” which within the social and political metaphysics of modernity takes form as the “figure of the worker,” glosses in the early Marx as “species-being of the human.” Likewise, I noted in chapter two Shao Lixin recognized in Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman as “zhenren.” What is crucial for our purposes here is that we remain sensitive to the paradoxical nature of the problem of exemplarity in the process of Bildung such as it informs the concept of the Bildungsroman. For if, as I have argued, the Chinese Marxist aesthetic appropriation of the figure of the human functions as an onto-typology (as opposed to the onto-theology in Hsia), then we can perhaps better understand some of the complications and aporias that attend

70

Lacoue-Labarthe, “Oedipus as Figure,” 7.

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the emergence of the Chinese socialist Bildungsroman. Redfield points to one of the key ambivalences that mark the entire discourse of aesthetic exemplarity. In his discussion of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education, he highlights the underlying homological relationship that links the development of “aesthetic form,” the individual and the human race as such: Thus aesthetic, individual, and species formation all occur as an interdependent system of homologies, and as a progress in the form of a spiral or transumptive return, which is the only form of progress for a system of exemplarity.71

What haunts the logic of aesthetic exemplarity is its necessary reliance upon examples (Vorbild ), which are themselves concrete, historically existing models of an “original spontaneity.” But precisely because it is an example of that “original spontaneity” it is not the spontaneity of subjective auto-formation itself. Thus the problem lies in the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic subject’s (non-)identification with the examplar. In Gadamer’s elucidation of Bildung, both the nach and vor, come simultaneously into play. Redfield writes, “Signifying both Nachbild and Vorbild, Bildung encloses the structure of mimesis itself, which, through the temporalizing prefixes nach [after] and vor [ before], becomes the structure of typology: Bildung mirrors and prefigures its own fulfillment (48).” Hence, the “figurative and temporal complications” of Bildung produces the aesthetic subject’s “double bind.” For the subject is thus compelled to “identify with the model in order to become what the subject already is; however, this also means that the subject must not identify with anything—particularly not a master or exemplar—that is not already the subject itself.”72 To translate this aporetic logic into the terms of the Chinese socialist realist Bildungsroman, the exemplars of revolutionary courage such as Jiang Jie and Xu Yunfeng in Hongyan must be the object of the reader’s subjective identification at the very same time that the very same reader as her own revolutionary subject in auto-formation refuses to identify with the historical figure turned literary character in the novel. The reader can only identify with these revolutionary heroes to the extent that the latter embody exemplary instantiations of what the revolutionary-subject-in-formation already is, implicity, and toward which the ever more explicit realization of her revolutionary Bildung is finally aimed. 71 72

Redfield, Phantom Formations, 21. Redfield, Phantom Formations, 49, italics in the original.

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Aesthetic exemplarity helps us to account for how Chinese revolutionary Bildungsromane have generally been received, especially by critics in the West. For nothing could be clearer than the specific form of refusal to identify with a revolutionary hero like Zhao Yulin 赵玉林 in Zhou Libo’s Hurricane that characterizes David Wang’s discussion of the novel: What distinguishes Hurricane’s characterization is that its peasant heroes, once injected with revolutionary zeal, act like robots whose continued motion can only be stopped when they have run out of power. Death becomes their destiny. Thus when Zhao Yulin, the impoverished peasant who rises in the movement to a brave and virtuous proletarian hero, dies a heroic death [. . . .] one feels less grief than relief.73

Needless to say this refusal to identify sympathetically with the figure of Zhao Yulin is fundamentally different from the one I have been exploring in this chapter. For to see in Zhao Yulin’s transformation from poor peasant to Peasant Association Chairman through his identification with the universality communism clearly embodied for those who were willing to die for its realization merely something akin to a child’s wind-up toy risks missing the point. Ironically, the novel itself from beginning to end thematizes the political and military hazards of allowing the peasants to rely dependently upon the superior organization skills and military force of the Work Team (gongzuodui, 工作队) that has been dispatched to Yuanmao Village 元茂屯 to mobilize the peasant masses. Instead, the fundamental problem the novel addresses is the necessity of ensuring that the peasants themselves become consciously committed to and invested in the overthrow of the entire social structure that the big landlord, Han Laoliu represents. In other words, for Zhao Yulin’s “revolutionary zeal” to achieve the level of political significance and effectivity the CCP needs for its very survival at this key juncture late in the Chinese Civil War, Zhao can never be only a cog in the machine of land reform set manipulatively and instrumentally in motion by an extraneous ideological force, in this case the CCP Work Team led by Team Leader Xiao. Instead, his acquisition of revolutionary consciousness is premised upon his capacity to recognize that he must identify not with the individual members of the Work Team, but instead with the process of subjective-auto-formation they model as Vorbild. For Zhao Yulin, Xiao Wang embodies this process as a poor peasant turned full-fledged communist member of the Work Team. Put another way, 73

David Wang, Monster that is History, 166.

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in the Hegelian terms I invoked earlier, Zhao is a “cog,” but only because he also voluntarily chooses to lay fully conscious claim to his “peasant origins” (zhuangjia dizi 庄稼底子) as the means to achieve universal liberation. Works like Hurricane, Song of Youth, and Red Crag fully presuppose the elaborate and highly complex series of institutional mediations that comprise modern aesthetic ideology, which function not only in post-liberation China and in the modern West as well. Any attempt to read and analyze such novels without taking this larger context into proper account will inevitably find in them only the “crassness and vulgarity” that Redfield remarks, always “haunts the Bildungsroman.”74 I have argued that instead, what is necessary is a more comprehensive and engaged effort to read such novels—indeed approach all socialist artistic production— with a sensitivity to the way the expansive powers of the aesthetic fundamentally transform what constitutes the Chinese socialist realist novel. As Redfield insists: It is not just that aesthetics is historically inseparable from the vastly complex developments one summarizes as the emergence of bourgeois hegemony—industrialization, capitalization, and the appearance of the modern bureaucratic state; mercantilist and imperialist expansion; the secularization of religious discourse; the reconfiguration of gender roles; the emergence of the culture industry, and so on. . . . Because of its internal dynamics, the story of aesthetics inflates until one is telling stories of the longest sort of historical events (the consolidation of capitalism, or of the modern “subject”), events which compete in grandeur with the philosophical difficulties they contexualize . . . (11).

The contents of what would become Chinese socialist realist novels are, of course, nothing if not “stories of the longest sort.” But they became so most of all because the discourse of modern aesthetic ideology imposed a philosophical burden on such novels that I have sought to explain as the product of China’s installation of the modern concept of literature. Early May Fourth realism embarked Chinese literature on an itinerary that, once wedded firmly to modern eidasthetics, arrived very much of necessity at a socialist realism that for too long has seemed the aesthetically compromised and ethically suspect deviation from the proper development of modern Chinese literature. The journey was in fact a remarkably short one, spanning but forty odd years. It would

74

Redfield, Phantom Formations, 52.

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miss the point, however, to imagine that the vast project embodied and encompassed by socialist realism historically, ended with the demise of Chinese socialism. For socialist realism is merely the exemplary, if radicalized, instance of what constitutes the modern institution of literary study as the core element of university humanities curricula. The goal of modern aesthetic ideology has quite successfully been realized in the establishment of a modern canon of Chinese literature for the purposes of humanistic education, both in China and around the globe in universities where Chinese literature is taught. The risk, therefore, of dismissing, marginalizing or (mis-)reading Chinese socialist realist literature as merely a literary critical embarrassment or artistic travesty has always been the failure to critically examine the conditions of our own institutional formation.

GLOSSARY OF CHINESE TERMS “A Q zhengzhuan 阿Q 正传” Baigongguan 白宫馆 baochou de huozhong 报仇的火种 «Baofeng zhuyu 暴风骤雨» Beidaihe 北戴河 benzhi 本质 bi xiucai zhang san bei 比秀才长三辈 bie yige zij i 别一个自己 «Breaking Away 隔绝» «Cai Yi wenji 蔡仪文集» Cai Yi 蔡仪 «Cai Yuanpei ji qi meixue sixiang 蔡元培及其美学思想» Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 Cao Qiqiao曹七巧 Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 “Chalatusitela de xuyan 察拉图斯忑拉的序言” chaoxue 巢穴 «Chenbao fukan 晨报副刊» Cheng Gang 成刚 chengzhang xiaoshuo 成長小说 Chiang Kwei ( Jiang Gui) 姜贵 chichide 痴痴的 “Chongqing dangzuzhi pohuai jingyan he yuzhong qingxingde baogao 重庆党组织破坏经过和狱中情形的报告” chouxiang siwei 抽象思维 chou 抽 «Chuangye shi 创业史» chushen buchun 出身不纯 da rangqilai 大嚷起来 “Da Yun Ming xian sheng 答允明先生” Dai Li 戴笠 «Dangdai xiaoshuo 当代小说» dianxing 典型 dianxing huanjing 典型环境 dianxingxing 典型性

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diji de dianxing 低级的典型 dongde 动得 dongfang 东方 Du Fu 杜甫 erchu 二处 “Ershi shiji chengzhang xiaoshuo yanjiu (1) 20 世纪 成长 小说 研究 综述 (一)” fanyi jieshao 翻译介绍 fanyinglun 反映论 Feng Yuanjun 冯沅君 Feng Zhi 冯至 foudingxing 否定性 Fu Zhigao 甫志高 gaikuo 概括 gainian de juxiangxing 概念的具象性 gaoji de dianxing 高级的典型 gebie 个别 Geleshan geming jinianguan 歌乐山革命纪念馆 geng dianxing 更典型 gongzuodui, 工作队 guangfan de guiding 广泛的规定 Guo Moruo 郭沫若 guominxing 国民性 guyou de daode 固有的道德 guzhu 雇主 «Haigang 海港» Han Laoliu 韩老六 He Shu 何蜀 henyou paichi yiduan [. . .] de zhengqi 很有排斥 [. . .] 异端的正气 “Hongmei zan 红梅赞” «Hongyan 红岩» Hu Feng 胡风 Hu Shi 胡适 huamian 画面 Huang Xiansheng 黄显声 huanyang 豢养 huosiren 活死人 jianchen 奸臣 Jiang Hua 江华

glossary of chinese terms

283

“Jiang Jie shouguo de daodi shi shenme kuxing 江姐受过的到底是什么酷 刑” Jiang Jie 江姐 ( Jiang Zhujun 江竹君) «Jiaoyu shijie 教育世界» jiaoyu xiaoshuo 教育小说 jiben guiding tiaojian 基本规定条件 Jiefang ribao 解放日报» jieji benneng 阶级本能 jieji ganqing 阶级感情 jieji huo jieceng 阶级或阶层 jieji youai 阶级友爱 «Jin suoyin 金锁记» jingshen shang de shenglifa 精神上的胜利法 jingxin dongpo 惊心动魄 jintiao 金条 Jixie de jizhong 机械的集中 jiyi shang 记忆上 Ju 具 Juansheng 涓生 jueji 绝迹 “Jueshi xiaoshuo ‘Hongyan’ mingxian bushao shishi ewu 党史小说 «红岩” 明显存在不少史实讹误” junshi weiyuanhui diaocha tongji ju 军事委员会调查统计局 Juntong 军统 juti de gainian 具体的概念 juxiangxing 具象性 K’ang Yu-wei (Kang Youwei) 康有为 kaoju 考据 kongbu 恐怖 kuanglie de ganqing 狂烈的感情 “Kuangren riji 狂人日记” lao Heige’er 老黑格尔 Lao She 老舍 leixing 类型 «Li Da wenji 李达文集» Li Da 李达 Li Jingyuan 李敬原 Li Si 李四 li yi lian chi 礼义廉耻

284

glossary of chinese terms

Li Yingyi 李英毅 Li Zehou’s 李泽厚 “Liang Qichao zhexue sixiang lunwen xuan 梁启超哲学思想论文选” Liang Qichao 梁启超 «Lienü Zhuan 烈女传» lilun 理论 Lin Botang 林伯唐 Lin Daojing 林道静 Lin Hong 林红 lingxiu 领袖 Liu Debin 刘德彬 Liu Guoding 刘国定 Liu Qing 柳青 Liu Siyang 刘思扬 Lu Jiachuan 卢嘉川 Lu Ling 路翎 Lu Xu Quanji 鲁迅全集 Lu Xun yiwenji 鲁迅译文集» Lu Xun 鲁迅 Lu Zhaolin 卢照邻 «Lun Heige’er de “Luojixue” 论黑格尔的“逻辑学» Luo Dafang 罗大方 Luo Guangbin 罗广斌 luoji siwei 逻辑思维 «Mao Dun Wenyi zalunji, shangji 茅盾文艺杂论集» Mao Dun 茅盾 Mao Renfeng 毛人凤 Mao Zedong 毛泽东 «Meixue yuanli tigang 美学原理提纲» meixuere 美学热 meiyou renhe gongtong yuyan 没有任何共同语言 miaomang 渺茫 minzu 民族 moluo jieji 没落阶级 “Moluo shi li shuo 摩羅詩力說” mosha 抹杀 moxie 摹写 nahan 呐喊 nan jiayu de xiaoma 难驾驭的小马 nannü zhi dafang 男女之大防

glossary of chinese terms Nicai shi de qiangzhe 尼采式的强者 Nie Zhebin 聂振斌 nü xuesheng 女学生 numu er shi 怒目而视 piaopiaoran 飘飘然 «Pipan zhixue de pipan: Kangde shu ping 批判哲学的批判:康德述评» pubian zhenil 普遍真理 Qian Zhongshu 钱钟书 «Qingchun zhige 青春之歌» qingjiaotu 清教徒 qingzuo shu 倾左书 Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 Ran Yizhi 冉益智 ren 人 renlei de dianxing renwu 人类典型的人物 renlei de dianxing 人类的典型 renlei 人类 renshi de guocheng 认识的过程 rui (lei) 类 Sang Hu 桑弧 sangshi jingjue 丧失警觉 Shangshi 伤逝 Shen Congwen 沈从文 Shen Zui 沈醉 shengjing xianchuan 圣经贤传 shijie datong 世界大同 Shu Xiu 淑秀 “Shubenhua yu Nicai 叔本华与尼采” Song Guitang 宋贵堂 Sun Mingxia 孙明霞 Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian) 孫逸仙 (Sun Zhongshan 孙中山) Tang Si 唐俟 (pseud. of Lu Xun 鲁迅) tanlan, 贪婪 Tewu Chu 特务处 Tian Han 田汉 tiaojian 条件 Tingjinbao 挺进报 tongzhi 同志 Wang Guowei 王国维 Wang Xiaoyan 王晓燕

285

286

glossary of chinese terms

Wen shi jing hua 文史精华 “Wenhua pianzhi lun 文化偏至论” wenxue dianxing 文学典型 “Wenyi yu piping 文艺与批评” wuxia 武侠 wuzhi cai shi di yici de dongxi 物质才是第一次的东西 xiang 象 xianzhuang shu 线装书 «Xiaoshuo yuebao 小说月报» «Xin Chao 新潮» xingshi 形式 xingxiang siwei 形象思维 xingxiang xing 形象性 xingxiang 形象 «Xinmeixue, gaixieben 新美学改写本» «Xinyishu lun 新艺术论» xiuyang xiaoshuo 修养小说 Xu Dishan 许地山 (Luo Huasheng 落花生) Xu Shoushang 许寿裳 Xu Wei 徐渭 Xu Xiaoxuan 许晓轩 Xu Yuanju 徐远举 Xu Yunfeng 许云峰 Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 ya 崖 Yang Mo 杨末 Yang Yiyan 杨益言 yanshi 岩石 ye nanren 野男人 Ye Shaojun 叶绍钧 Yi gong yijia yanjiu “Yi sanmin zhuyi yueshu yanlun 以三民主义约束言论” “Yile ‘Gongren Suihuilüefu’ zhi hou 译了‘工人绥惠略夫’之后” yinyou 引诱 “Yishulun 艺术论” yixiang 意象 «Yu Guan 玉官» Yu Jingtang 余敬唐 Yu Shizhi 于是之 Yu Yongze 余永泽

glossary of chinese terms Yuanmao Village 元茂屯 «Zai liehuo zhong yongsheng 在烈火中永生» zaixian 再现 zaofan youli 造反有理 Zhang Aijing 张爱敬 Zhang Shiying 张世英 Zhang Tianyi 张天翼 Zhang Wenqing 张文清 Zhang Xueliang 张学良 Zhao Yulin 赵玉林 Zhazidong 渣滓洞 Zheng Defu 郑德富 Zheng Jin 郑瑾 zhengli guosui 整理国粋 zhengzhuan 正传 zhenli 真理 zhenren 真人 zhi, liang he xingtai 质, 量和形态 zhongchen 类型忠臣奸臣 Zhongmei tezhong jishu hezuosuo 中美特种技术合作所 zhongshu 种属 zhongzu 种族 Zhou Enlai 周恩来 Zhou Libo 周立波 Zhou Yang 周杨 «Zhu Guangqian quanji 朱光潜全集» Zhu Guangqian 朱光潜 zhuangjia dizi 庄稼底子 zhuguan jingshen 主观精神 zibaishu 自白书 Zijun 子君 ziyou 自由 zuo dian wenzhang 做点文章 «Zuo Zhuan 左传» 至於書名, 則本人愈後所提 zhiyu shuming, ze benren yuhou suoti

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INDEX

Abstract concepts 156, 219 Abstract formulism 144 Abstract thought (chouxiang siwei) 129 Abstraction, power of 182, 191 Adorno, Theodor vii, xii, 61, 65, 119, 138–40, 145, 149–55, 158 Aesthetic Theory 152 Negative Dialectics 152–53 preponderance of the object 152 and Max Horkeimer, Dialectic of Englightenment 61 Aesthetic education 37, 78, 187–88, 207, 209–10, 273, 276 Aesthetic ideology ix, 2, 37, 86, 165, 236, 273, 278–79 Aesthetic modernity i, xii–xiii, 148, 177, 186–87 Aesthetics vii–viii, 13–17, 27–30, 37, 55, 81–82, 92–93, 119–21, 128–30, 141–42, 145–47, 150–51, 161–62, 205–7, 213–15, 223–25 dialectical materialist 150 god-building 96 modern Chinese Marxist 10 modern discourse of 14, 39, 238 onto-theo-logical 36 revolutionary 94 socialist realist 26, 42, 64, 175, 198, 203, 205, 257 universality vii, 149 Aesthetics fever (meixuere) 15, 30 Aesthetic theory 7, 44, 50, 60, 97, 119–21, 130, 140, 149–52, 155, 158, 165, 167–68, 186–87, 223 Agar, Herbert 126 Agency for International Development 244 Ah Q vii, 1, 5–6, 9, 32, 43, 49, 81, 86–87, 95, 98–113, 116–17, 161, 199 Ah Qism 99 Alienation 256 aesthetic 121, 144 socialist 30 Allegory 32, 66–68, 70, 72–74, 205–6 national 5 Althusser, Louis 15, 63 Amah Wu 103–4

American Lebensraum 175 Anderson, Kevin 138, 142 Anderson, Marston 20, 42–45, 47–48, 51–60, 64, 76, 81–82, 85, 138, 178 Limits of Realism vii, 42–43, 51, 53–59, 64 Ansell-Pearson, Keith 98 Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign 41 Archetype 189, 195–97 human 194 national 195 Archetypicality 25 Arendt, Hannah 154–55, 157, 193, 195 Origins of Totalitarianism 157 self-fulfilling idea 157 Aristotle 58–60, 90 Art and life 231 and reality 150 revolutionary 58 symbolic 228 Artistic knowledge 150–51, 154, 158–59, 178–79, 182, 185, 190, 192 Artsybashev, Mikhail 87, 89–92, 99, 164, 275 Millionaire 91 Sanin 90–91 The Worker Shevyrev 89 Artzibashef, Michael Petrovitch (see Artsybashev, Mikhail) 91 Aryan 174 Asher, Kenneth 133 Auto-formation 276 subjective 276 Autopoeitic 78 Autoproductive 78 Autoproductivity 78 of nature 78 Avant-garde 13, 53 Avenarius, Richard Heinrich Ludwig 94 Babbit, Irving 21 Bacchus 219 Bad conscience 99–100 Baigongguan 241–42, 245–46, 266

302

index

Bailey, Alison 80–81 Bakhtin, Mikhail 31, 82 Balibar, Etienne 4–5 Barnard, Philip 11–12, 24, 170 Barthes, Roland 14, 31, 44–45, 55, 58–59, 66 Écriture 53 Batteux, Abbé 224 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 14 Beautiful viii, 14, 77, 201, 205–11 Beauty 2, 16–17, 144, 146, 196, 205–10, 220, 224 Beidaihe 206, 209–11, 215–16, 218, 220, 222, 232 Beiner, Ronald 155 Belinsky, Vissarion 92, 97, 163, 223 Bernstein, J. M. 121, 144–47, 149, 152 The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno 121, 144, 146–47, 149, 152 Bild 114–15, 124, 162, 171, 248, 274–75 Bildung viii, 27, 39, 75, 77–78, 115, 159, 171–72, 223, 248, 273–76 revolutionary 235, 265–66, 276 Bildungsroman viii, 2, 38, 164–65, 206, 235–36, 265, 272, 274–75 (auto-)biographical 205 chengzhang xiaoshuo 274 Chinese revolutionary 277 Chinese socialist realist 27, 39, 165, 276 modern Chinese 81 nineteenth-century 272 revolutionary 201, 264 socialist 236 socialist realist 43, 162, 183 xiuyang xiaoshuo 274 Bilsky, Leora 155 Bird, Vivian 173 Boele, Otto 91 Bolshevik 157 Bolshevism 166 Bordwell, David 163 Bottomore, Tom 93 Bourdieu, Pierre 12 Bourgeois positivist science 130 Bowie, Andrew 79 Brooks, Cleanth 4, 18, 22, 33, 120, 122–23, 126, 133, 135–36, 138, 140 Brown, Nicholas xii, 2–3, 12, 15, 124, 159

Utopian Generations: Political Horizon of Twentieth-century Literature xii, 2–3, 12, 15–18, 124, 164 Buddhism 126, 236–37 Buddhist 107 Burbidge, John W. 180 Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Military Affairs Commission ( junshi weiyuanhui diaocha tongji ju) 50, 241, 243–44, 247, 249–51, 253–54, 260–63, 265–66 Butler, Judith 73–74 Excitable Speech 73–74 Button, Peter 12 Cai Yi vii–viii, xii, 25–27, 32, 44–45, 48–50, 120–23, 129–30, 132–34, 141–59, 161–62, 167–69, 175–94, 196–98, 223–24, 274–75 artistic practice 183 Cai Yi Wenji (CYWJ) 150–51, 153–54, 156–58, 179, 181–84, 191–94 New Aesthetics (Xinmeixue) 50, 120, 129, 177, 228 and New Criticism 121 New Theory of Art (Xin yishulun) 66, 121, 153, 168, 177, 179, 190, 197, 224 Outline of Aesthetic Principles (Meixue yuanli tigang) 224 and Walt Whitman xii, 165, 188 Cai Yuanpei (Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei) 64, 89, 129–30, 132, 134, 136, 150, 152–54, 156–58, 177–78, 181, 188, 190–91, 193, 195, 207 neo-Kantianism 207 “Replace Religion with Aesthetic Education” 207 Calichman, Richard xv, 65 Cannibalism 57, 71–74, 79, 81 Cao Cao 156 Cao Xueqin 217 Dream of the Red Chamber 7, 32, 65, 217 Capitalism xii–xiii, 15–16, 93, 129, 132, 137–41, 164, 170, 238, 245, 278 Capitalist accumulation 153 Capitalist modernity 120, 130, 149 Capuzzi, Frank A. 166 Carlyle, Thomas 188 Carravetta, Peter 32

index Cass instinct ( jieji benneng) 257, 261, 263 Catharsis 56–60 Catholicism 127 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 244 Cervantes, Miguel de 194 Chambers, Robert 171 Chan, Sylvia 42 Cheek, Timothy 170 Chenbao 87 Chen Duxiu 77–78 Cheng Gang 235, 247–51, 253, 259–61, 263–65 Chernyshevsky, Nicholas 92–93, 97 Cheung, Chiu-yee 87, 89, 98–99, 101, 109–10 Chiang Kai-shek 115–16, 241, 253, 259 Chiang Kwei 136 Chinese Communism 139–40 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 41, 48, 65, 167–68, 193, 201, 204, 206, 220, 230, 240, 249–50, 259, 264, 268–70, 277 literary bureaucracy 75, 135, 143 Chinese Marxism 28–30, 45, 50, 85, 110, 119–21, 128, 130, 132, 137–38, 140–42, 144, 169, 178, 199, 274–75 Chinese realism x, 42–45, 53, 55–57, 59–60, 63–64, 70, 81–82, 86, 178, 274 Chinese Secret Service 240–41, 253 Chinese Studies 64, 92 Chongqing 120, 123, 149, 246, 256, 265, 268 Chongqing Party Organization 246, 265 Chow, Rey 6, 238 Christianity 236 Christian God 114, 161 Christianity 32–33, 35–36, 91, 100, 108, 113–16, 124, 126–27, 161–62, 217, 236–37 Class capitalist 262 declining 257 reactionary 256 social 182, 194, 265, 267 Class background 271 initial 271 Class comradeship ( jieji youai ) 259 Class enemy 266 Class essentialism 242, 266, 271 Classical Cinema 163

303

Classicism 166 Class identification 269 Class identities 2 Class love 134–35, 216, 220 Class origins 242, 266, 268–69, 271 bourgeois 271 impure 268, 271 Class solidarity 262 Cognition aesthetic 149–50, 179 truth-only 149 Cognitive/theoretical 216 Cold War 4, 8, 11, 26, 231, 243–44 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria 23 Colonialism 12, 132, 139, 170, 214, 216 Commodity 3, 140 Commodity exchange 17 Communism 21, 127–28, 130, 138–39, 150, 168, 171, 193, 202, 231, 238, 243, 245, 268–69 Communists 232, 249–53, 259–60, 268–69 petty bourgeois 134 Community 51, 208, 210, 235, 267–69 national 271 organic 237 Comparative literature 13, 15, 19, 26 Concrete concepts 156–57 Concrete Experience 148 Concrete freedom 143–44 Concrete universal 143, 145, 147, 239 Concrete universality vii, 141 Confucianism 31, 34, 36, 102–3, 107, 116, 126 gender dogma 104 New Life Movement 116 Confucius 34 Analects (Lunyu) 34 Great Learning (Daxue) 34 Consciousness x, 38, 77, 147, 152–53, 155, 237 aesthetic 120 human 130, 150 modern 139 originary 130 reified 152 revolutionary 206, 247, 277 Contemplation, aesthetic 208–10 Continental philosophy xi, 11, 28–29 banishment of 11, 140 modern 11, 147

304

index

Conway, Daniel W. 113 Cook, Deborah 153 Coole, Diana H. 64, 233 Cosmopolitan 3, 10, 205, 218 literary order 2 literary sensibilities 217 Counter-insurgency, intelligence gathering 261 Counter-insurgency techniques 245 Counter-revolution 116–17 Courage 93, 252–53 revolutionary 229, 252, 276 Critique, aesthetic vii, 144 Critique of modernity aesthetic vii, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151 Croce, Benedetto 119, 151, 228 Crocker, Lester G. 224 Cuba 189 Cultural critique 42, 65, 89, 108, 128, 138–39, 141 Cultural difference 10 Cultural relativism 115 Cultural Revolution 15, 29–31, 46, 71, 97, 119, 142, 241, 243, 247, 262, 273 Curricula 29, 238 university humanities 279 Daguerreotyping 192 Dai Jinhua 203 Dai Li 149, 240–41, 243–45, 253, 262 Damrosch, David 3 Daoism 107 Darstellung 76–77, 172 Darwin, Charles 250 Deane, Hugh 243 Deleuze, Gilles 9, 12, 52, 85, 90–91, 100, 105–6, 109–11 Nietzsche and Philosophy 9, 100, 105–6, 109–11 Democracy 3, 188, 195, 198 modern Western social 128 Deng Xiaoping 41, 128 Denneny, Michael 155 Denton, Kirk 7, 82, 98 Derrida, Jacques x, 12, 14–15, 31, 52, 66, 121, 144–45, 175 Glas 175 Descartes, René 133–34 Dialectical materialism 142, 149, 168, 175, 177–78, 186, 201, 203–4, 219, 233

artistic type viii, 176 as cosmology-ontology 186 Dialectical synthesis 186 Dialectics 12, 64, 134, 138, 140, 142, 179, 202–4, 213, 219, 222, 233, 250, 254, 259, 263 speculative 203 Didacticism 14, 125–26 humanitarian 125–26 Diderot, Denis 224–27 Dilthey, Wilhelm, Human Sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) 131 Dionysus 64, 148, 233 Diremption 23, 25, 128, 139 Dirlik, Arif 115–17 Disavowal, fetishistic 139 Don Quixote 194 Duiker, William J. 207 Duke, Michael S. 20–26, 178, 186–87 Dumas, Alexander 217 Eagleton, Terry 13–15, 209 Early German Romanticism (Frühromantik) 12, 15, 78, 80, 85, 92, 97, 115 Athenaeum 79 East Asian Area Studies, post-war North American 10 Eckerman, Johann Peter 3 Education, humanistic 279 Eichmann Adlof 155 Adolf 155 Eidaesthetic itinerary xii, 124, 159, 186, 199 Eidaesthetics viii, xii, 44, 86, 88, 115, 164–65, 169, 171, 178, 188, 274, 278 Eighth Route Army 249 Elgin, Lord 35 Engels, Friedrich 3, 177, 186 Anti-Dühring 202, 219 Letters 177 English Civil War 133 Enlightenment 61, 65, 72, 75, 124, 145, 149, 166 Chinese 31 modern 158 subjective formation 124 Enlightenment discourse, modern Chinese 65 Enlightenment intellectuals 64 Ethical action 270 Ethical evolution 94

index Ethics 72, 79, 146, 221–22 neo-Kantian idealist 93 Ethics and aesthetics 146 Ethnic identity 273 Ethos Martial 264 Militarist feudal 264 Evil 24, 32–34, 50, 103, 123–28, 136, 237, 255 human vii, 32, 35, 119 innate 123–24 metaphysical 123 Exemplarity 2, 6, 37, 104, 163–64, 177, 186–87, 237–39, 241, 243, 245, 247, 249, 271–73, 275–77, 279 aesthetic 38, 186, 188, 276 aesthetic logic of 37, 164 vernacular texts 187 and world literature vii, 1, 216 Experience aesthetic/cognitive 213 cognitive 77 instrumentalized modern 138 religious 203 Faber, Ernst 34–36 “A Systematical Digest of the Doctrines of Confucius According to the Analects, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean” 34 Faculty aesthetic 128 human mental 133 image making 192 Faith 1, 10, 35, 48, 104, 108, 126, 161, 268–69 religious 203 Fang Xiangqian (Fang Hsiang-ch’ien) 136 Fanon, Franz 12 Fascism 129–30, 166, 168, 198, 236 Fascism, and communism 204 Faust 94, 96 Female writer 215 modern 216 relation to national civilization 218 Feminism 213 Feng Yuanjun 222 Feng Zhi 274 Fetishism 140 Feudal ethics 217 Feudal oppression 212 Feudal patriarchy 226 Feudal relations 213

305

Feuerbach, Ludwig 38, 122, 162, 202 The Essence of Christianity 162 Figural 122 Figuration 68, 88, 158, 161, 166, 191–92, 256 Formation human 171 ideological 230 institutional 13, 141, 279 organic 184, 190, 196 Formation, revolutionary subject 159, 265 Formation, world-historical 196 Forward (Tingjinbao) 260–61, 265 Foster, Paul B. 1, 6 Foucault, Michel 7, 12, 273 subjective technology 270 Frankfurt School 139 Freedom x, xii, 38, 44, 52, 61, 76–77, 79, 143, 171, 211–12, 236–38, 251–55, 267, 269 Freedom, abstract 134, 137, 143 Freud, Sigmund 56, 121–22 Oedipus 95 Friedrich, Caspar David 209 Fu Zhigao 236, 257, 265 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 78, 114, 124, 131, 274, 276 formatio 274 Vorbild 274 Geleshan 247 Gender roles 278 Gender/sexual relations 213 Genealogy 4, 26, 33, 85, 100–101, 108, 119, 123, 223 Genette, Gérard 69 Germany 91, 129, 163–64, 167 Gestalt 88, 114, 122, 162, 167 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 3, 274 Wilhelm Meister 162 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 165, 274 Graff, Gerald, Literature Against Itself 23 Guomindang (KMT) 170, 256 Guo Moruo 176 Habermas, Jürgen 10, 61 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity 10, 61 Haigang 262 opera 262 Hamlet 194

306

index

Hansen, Miriam 163–64 Happy Valley (Geleshan) 243 Happy Valley Revolutionary Memorial 243 Hate speech 73 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich xi, 11–12, 28–29, 79, 116, 142–43, 145, 180–81, 188, 190–91, 203–4, 219–20, 223–26, 228–29, 232–33, 252–54 bad infinity 186 dialectical logic 12, 201 The Encyclopedia Logic: Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences 203, 219 Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences 254–55 infinite mind 255 Lectures on Fine Art 29–30, 225, 228–29 Logic 136, 180, 201, 203 Phenomenology of Spirit 180, 219–20, 254 Science of Logic 138, 142, 188, 190, 233 sense certainty 180 speculative reason 51 State 252 Understanding (Verstand ) 206 Unhappy consciousness 152 Hegelianism 6, 28, 30, 93, 145, 174–75, 177, 186, 190, 201, 223, 228, 237–38, 253, 265, 278 Hegemony 14, 132 bourgeois 278 Heidegger, Martin viii, xii, 31–33, 50–51, 77, 88, 90, 98, 113, 121–22, 135, 145, 161–62, 165–69, 172–73, 175 Basic Problems of Phenomenology 77 Bindings (das Verbindliche) 166 Hegel’s Concept of Experience 50 I-ness (Ichheit) 167 Letter to Ernst Jünger 172 Menschenschlag 172 Nietzsche 88 Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Modern Metaphysics 33, 135 poesie 88 rescendence 122, 162 subjectity 50 subjectum 172 and Ernst Jünger 167 type viii, 166

Helmholtz, Herman von 131–32 Heteroglossia 103–4 Hinduism 236 Historical development, human 258 Historicity 7 Hitler, Adolf 130, 198 Hofstadter, Albert 77 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich 79 “Oldest System Programme of German Idealism” 75, 79 Hollywood 163, 242 Holy Ghost 21, 141 Holy Spirit 236 Hook, Sidney 143 Hoolsema, Daniel J. 76–77 Horkeimer, Max 61 Hountondji, Paulin 15–16 Howe, Irving 20–21 Hsia, C. T. (Hsia Chih-tsing) vii, xii, 3–5, 9–11, 18, 20–28, 30–33, 35, 119–21, 123–28, 130, 133–38, 140–41, 143, 163–65, 238–39 History of Modern Chinese Fiction 3, 5, 11, 32 and Lu Xun 31 and Mao Zedong 141 and New Criticism 123 Hsia Tsi-An 128 Huang Guiyou 176, 196–97 Huang Xiansheng, General 246 Huang Yibing xv Hu Feng 82, 135 and Lu Ling 82 and Zhou Yang 144 Human 171 essence of 36–38, 162, 171, 275 genre of 171 modern metaphysical determination 168, 171 species being (Gattungswesen des Menschen) 37–38, 91, 94, 116, 149, 162, 171, 184, 195–96, 238, 275 Human beings, true (zhenren) 94 Human freedom 137, 212, 214 Human/global relation 218 Human-in-formation 248 Humanism x, 23, 61, 65, 174 modern 23, 51 Humanitarianism 126 Humanitas 275 Humanities viii–ix, xiii, 24, 33, 37, 95, 114, 130, 135, 164, 166–68, 171–72, 187–88, 196, 198, 270

index modern ix pedagogy ix Human liberation 212, 258 universal 261 Human nature 33, 125, 127, 134–35, 171 abstract 134, 137, 143 fallen 127, 134–37 static 137 Human reason 51, 128, 138, 166 Human Sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) 7, 130–32 Humboldt, Alexander von 114–15 Hu Qiuyuan 119 Hu Shi 77–78, 176, 204, 213, 216, 221 Huters, Theodore 82 Idealisms, philosophical 93, 169, 175 Idealist aesthetics 205, 207, 212, 223 Identification individual’s 270 self-conscious class 266 subjective 276 Ideology 15, 19, 37, 63, 66, 128, 133, 139, 157, 164, 188, 193, 209, 219, 249, 268–69 bourgeois 17, 96 totalitarian 204 Image (xingxiang) xii, 92, 124, 145–46, 148, 156–57, 162, 169, 173–74, 178, 190–91, 209, 213, 223–27, 229–30, 274–75 aesthetic 152, 225 artistic 179, 182, 184, 223 figure 174, 274 interiorized 230 inward 226 stereotyped racial 173 Image-ness (xingxiangxing) 224 Image thought (xingxiang siwei) 123, 129, 144, 148, 154, 163, 177, 190, 205, 223 Imagination 21, 123–24, 127–28, 141, 155, 157, 171, 174, 192, 207, 209, 211, 225 (Einbildungskraft) Kant 171 artistic 156–57 human 126 mythical 121 Imaginative nature 224 Imagism 196 Individual 168 Individualism 57, 91

307

Individuality 38, 166, 180, 184–85, 189–90, 252–53 Individual/universal relation 190 Interiority 100, 105, 226, 230 subjective 100 Intertextuality 53 Iraq 245, 262 Irigaray, Luce 171 Jameson, Frederic 5, 46–47, 51–54, 63, 177 Marxism and Form 45 Political Unconscious vii, 46–47, 51–54, 63 and Lacan 63 and modernist projection 55 Jancovich, Mark 33 The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism 26, 33, 123, 129–30, 138, 145–46 Japanese Imperial Army 149 Jauss, Robert 59 Jena Romantics 75–78, 170, 186 Jesus 109 Jiang Hua 211, 213, 217 Jiang Jie ( Jiang Zhujun) 235, 237, 249–50, 265, 271, 276 musical 243 Jiang Qing 97 Jiang Zhujun 235 Jing Wang 30, 128 Judgement 16–17, 33, 73, 146, 150, 152, 154–55, 208, 212, 215 aesthetic 145–46, 149, 212 determinant 154–55 faculty of 155 political 154–55 reflective 154–55 Jünger, Ernst 167, 169, 172, 275 The Worker: Dominion and Gestalt 95 Kang Youwei 136 Kant, Immanuel xi, 8, 11, 14, 29–30, 32, 51, 64, 76–77, 79–80, 86, 89, 121, 144–46, 154–55, 207–12 aesthetic presentation xii apperception 77 Critique of Judgement 14, 29, 77, 145–46, 154, 207 Critique of Practical Reason 77 Critique of Pure Reason 32, 51, 76–77 disinterestedness 22, 27, 210 finality 207 presentation 77, 122, 249

308

index

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 77 sensible presentation 76, 170 subjective finality 207 transcendental apperception 77 Kant Fever 30 Keats, John 122 Kenyon Review 122, 139, 145 King, Richard K. 146 Knowledge aesthetic 157, 222 artstic 154 conceptual 152, 157 scientific 25, 147, 151, 154, 158, 191 Korean War 242 Kuangren 47 Kuomindang (KMT) 116, 130, 149, 193, 201, 204, 206, 220–21, 230–31, 237, 240, 242–43, 247–54, 256–61, 263–65 Kyoto School 267 Lacan, Jacques 52–53, 55, 63–64 Real 52 LaCapra, Dominick 52, 63 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe x, 11–12, 14–15, 38–39, 44–45, 75–77, 79–80, 85–86, 88, 90, 95, 121–22, 166–72, 174–75, 193, 197–98 figura 88 Oedipus as figure 122, 275 Typography 50, 88, 90, 95, 162, 166–67, 172 and Jean-Luc Nancy Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism 11–12, 17, 24, 39, 44, 61, 76–80, 85–86, 170, 184 “The Nazi Myth” 157, 172, 174, 193, 195, 198 Land reform 277 Larson, Wendy 41 Laws abstract 179 historical 196 impersonal 14 universal 158 League of Chinese Left-wing Writers 119 Legal Marxism 93 Lenin, Vladimir Illich 12, 138, 142, 157

Collected Works V. I. Lenin 142 “Philosophical Notebooks: Conspectus of Hegel’s Science of Logic” 142 Lester, Cheryl 11–12, 24, 170 Liang Qichao 64, 75, 77–78, 190 Liberal democracy 204 Liberalism, soft 128 Liberation Daily 265 Li Da 178–81 Li Jingyuan 243, 257, 261 Lin Botang, and Kant 207 Lin Daojing 50, 202, 204–23, 225–32, 242, 246, 249 Lin Hong 230 and Liu Siyang 271 and Wang Xiaoyan 228 Lin Hong 229–30 Link, Perry 19, 26, 31, 241 Literary analysis 26 Literary archetypes 189 Literary canon, socialist realist 201, 203 Literary criticism xi, 17, 27, 38–39, 49, 89, 121, 164, 186, 239, 272 eidaesthetic 92 modern xi, 85, 235, 239 post-war North American 19 Literary exemplarity 39 Literary history 13, 272 Literary modernity ix, 8, 34, 43, 61, 75, 81, 164 global 83, 121 Literary pedagogy 80 Literary realism 17, 41, 44, 51, 53, 59–60, 62, 82–83, 85 bureaucratic 46 modern 42 modern Chinese x, 272 Literary scholarship xiii Literary studies 18, 187, 235, 273 modern 6 modern Chinese 4, 6, 8, 19, 24–26, 28–29, 121, 135, 142, 187, 238 Literary texts 8, 13, 19, 25, 33, 55, 61, 69, 81 self-conscious 78 Literary theory x, 8, 13, 28, 41, 79 continental 28 Marxist 97 practices x Literary type, modern 161 Literary vernacular modernism 163, 165

index Literary work, autotelic 120 Literature modern institutional configuration 141 romantico-modern concept of 11–12, 15 Literature-as-theory 86 Literature/theory relation 29, 163 Liu, Lydia 1, 5, 111, 116, 170 Translingual Practice 1, 103, 111, 113, 115, 170 translingual transformation 117 Liu Debin 241–43 Liu Geqing Affair 253 Liu Guoding 265 Liu Kang xi, 20–24, 30, 32, 38, 64, 78, 82, 95, 119, 140–41, 153, 178 and C. T. Hsia 32 Liu Qing 233 Liu Siyang 235–36, 257, 265, 268, 270–71 and Sun Mingxia 265 Liu Xiaobo 5, 36 Li Weijia 265 Li Yang xv Li Zehou 30 Logic aesthetic 186 aporetic 276 dialectical 253 Logical thought (luoji siwei) 144 Love xv, 24, 103, 106, 108, 134, 201, 215–16, 218–20 abstract 134, 137 brothers in 108 chaste 212 erotic 216 human 137 modern 220 Love relations 246 Literary scholarship, modern North American 33 Lu Jiachuan 212–13, 215–18, 220, 222 Lukács, Georg 45, 54, 82, 137–38, 177, 185–86, 198 History and Class Consciousness 137 Writer and Critic 185 Luker, Nicholas 90–91 Lu Ling 82 Lumpen-peasant 102, 104 Lunacharsky, Anatoly 92–94, 96–97 Fundamentals of Positivist Aesthetics 93–94

309

Luo Dafang 213, 221, 242 Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan ix, 38, 135, 158, 235, 237–39, 241–48, 251–52, 255–58, 260–63, 265–69, 271 Lu Xun 1–2, 5–6, 9, 20, 42–49, 51, 53–82, 85–90, 92–99, 101–4, 106–8, 110–11, 113–17, 161–62, 164–65 Ah Q vii, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97–101, 103–5, 107, 109, 111–15, 117, 162 Call to Arms (Nahan) 68, 74 Collected Translations of Lu Xun 87 Diary of a Madman 42–43, 46–49, 51, 53–54, 60–61, 75–76, 78–79, 82, 95, 97, 100, 224, 275 discursive paradigm of realism 65 and evolution 250 figure of 75, 81–82 and Guo Moruo 125, 197 In the Wine Shop (Zai jiulou shang) 56–57, 59 Lu Xun Collected Works (Lu Xun Quanji) 1, 87 and Mao Dun 36, 57 The Misanthrope (Gudezhe) 56–57, 59 neo-Confucian order 53 New Year’s Sacrifice (Zhufu) 56–57, 106 and Nietzsche 95 and Nora 222 and realist literary doctrine 82 Regret for Things Past (Shangshi) 222 Soap (Feizao) 213 The True Story of Ah Q (Ah Q Zhengzhuan) 1, 87, 110 The Worker Shevyrev (Gongren Suihuilüefu) 87 Lu Xun and Ye Shaojun 56 Lu Zhaolin 215 Lyell, William A. 100, 104 Lytle, Andrew Nelson 133 Magistrate Bao 211 Man 37 image of 124–25 living image of 123–24 metaphysical figure of 167 whole soul of 23 Mankind 108, 162–63, 166 Mao Dun (Mao Tun) xii, 1–6, 9–10, 31, 36, 60, 136, 161, 164 and Lu Xun 2, 36

310

index

Mao Dun wenyi 2 and realism 62 Maoism 12, 231 Mao Renfeng 258–59 Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) 134–37, 143, 158, 170, 176, 186, 190, 197, 269–70 Yan’an Talks 135, 144, 189 zaofan youli 270 Martyr, revolutionary 214, 237, 246, 263 Marx, Karl xi, 3, 10, 30, 38, 93–94, 122, 132, 143, 153, 157, 162, 171, 177, 186, 202 Das Kapital 266 early works 94, 162, 171, 238, 275 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 38, 94, 171 species-consciousness 38 and Friedrich Engels 3, 12, 38, 177, 199 and Friedrich Engles, Communist Manifesto 3 and Friedrich Nietzsche 8 Marxism and Hegelianism 221 and Southern Agrarian Criticism vii, 128 Marxism and Cultural Theory 30 Marxism-Leninism 266, 269 Marxist aesthetics, Cai Yi 177 Materialism 96 historical 93 and idealism 92, 96 non-dialectical 138 Materialist philosophical aesthetics 120 May Fourth 16, 31, 81 McCarthy, Joseph 143 McCarthyism 11, 140, 238 McCarthy Era 11 McDougall, Bonnie 17 Mechanical causality 211 Meng Yue 203, 213–15, 232 Metaphysics modern 33, 135, 166–67, 172 political 275 social 275 Method, dialectical materialist 179 Miles, Navy Rear-Admiral Milton 133, 240–41 Mill, John Stuart 131 Miller, Arnold V. 180 Mimesis, realistic 65

Mimesis (moxie) 58–60, 65, 179, 276 Model-types (leixing) 184 Modern aesthetics xi, 18, 141, 164, 177 Modern Chinese literary canon 3 Modern Chinese literature, institution of vii, ix, xiii, 4, 13, 24, 80, 85–86, 98, 177, 238, 272, 279 Modernism xii, 41, 46, 54, 163, 196 aesthetic 121, 144–46, 149 China and America 196 high literary 162 literary 162 and Modernity 163 vernacular literary 238 Modernism, Chinese vii, 43–45, 47 Modernist literature 54 Modernity discourses of 9–10 enlightened 147 global eidaesthetic 162 instrumentalized enlightenment 121 multiple 10 political 245 Modernization, political 23 Modern subjective identity 269 Moral autonomy 269 Morality 80, 91, 100, 144–46, 155, 198 private 35, 146 Morning Gazette (Chenbao) 87 Multiculturalism 3 Mysticism 175, 203 Myth 61, 73–74, 85, 93, 121–22, 172–73, 193, 198 national 213 Mythology 73, 79 Nancy, Jean-Luc x–xii, 11–12, 14–15, 17, 24, 38–39, 44–45, 75–77, 79–80, 85–86, 168–72, 174–75, 193, 195, 197–98, 237–38 Narratives aesthetic 2 fascist or Marxist totalitarian 165 historical 2 subject-formation 273 totalitarian Marxist 165, 236 Nation, individuality of 189 Nation (minzu) 194, 230 National Character (guominxing) vii, 1–2, 5–6, 31, 35–38, 99, 106, 111–13, 115–17, 161, 170, 275 and Ah Q 117

index and art 6, 37 critique of 36 modern doctrine of 115 National conscription 267, 271 National identity 111, 195, 205 Nationalism 174, 188–89, 201, 222 imperial 267 National literatures 22, 187, 195 study of 187 National Socialism, German 166, 168, 193, 198 National Socialist 198 National spirit 221 Nation-state 131–32, 270–71 modern 205–6, 270 modern Nationalist Chinese 221 rationalized 230 Natural sciences 129–32, 137 Negation 180, 201–2, 226, 232, 266, 271 Negation-with-preservation (Sublation, Aufhebung) 212 Negative determination 111 Negativity ( foudingxing) 64, 136, 201, 203, 205, 219, 233, 255, 259, 263, 267–68 dialectical 204, 263 productive 232 Negroponte, John 245 Neo-Confucianism 72, 102, 108, 213, 274 conscience 105 propriety 213 sexual ethics 103 Neo-Kantianism 93 New Criticism 4, 6, 8–9, 11, 18–28, 30–33, 119–23, 125–26, 129–30, 133, 135, 137–42, 144–45, 150, 164–65, 238 and Adorno vii and Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom 141 humanist 238 and Marxism 26, 139 and referentiality 120 and Yale 14 New Critics 20, 23, 25, 130, 134, 137, 139, 142 New Culture Movement 78 New Deal, humanitarianism 126 New Life Movement 115–17, 231 and European fascist movements 117 rhetoric 117

311

New Youth 67, 69, 73 magazine 77 Niebuhr, Reinhold 34 Nietzsche, Friedrich xi, 9, 36, 47, 61, 79, 85–95, 98–102, 105–9, 111, 113–14, 117, 122, 144, 148, 166–67 anti-Christ 113 Ecce Homo 99 Eternal Recurrence 113 faculty of forgetting 109–10 genealogical analysis 21 genealogist 85 Genealogy of Morality 47, 98, 100–101, 105, 107–8 manufacturing guilt 100, 105 Overhuman (Übermensch) 89–90, 93, 95, 99, 106 philosopher-artist 85, 90 philosopher-legislator 85 philosopher of the future 85 philosopher-physician 85 reactive type 109 ressentiment vii, 98–99, 101, 106–11 revenge 98–99, 101, 107–9, 111, 113 sympathia malevolens 108 transvaluation 102 Will to Power 122 Zarathustra 88, 167 and Lu Xun 89, 95 and Marx 94 and Max Stirner 91 and nihilism 109 Nietzscheanism, and Lu Xun 89 Nietzschean Marxism 93, 96 Nie Zhebin 207 Nihilism 111, 257 Nihilism, Christian 116 Nominalism 180 North-China Herald 34 Nothingness 219 Noumenal 64, 211 Nusinov, Isaak Markovich 151, 158 Essence of Literature 151 Object external 225 material 139, 195 Objective world 154 Objectivity 36 scientific 23 Office of Strategic Services Old South 123, 132–33 Old World 188

240

312

index

Onto-anthropology 122 Ontology 61–62, 76, 122 modern 122 of the Real 62, 64–65 Onto-theology 31–33, 39, 116, 121–22, 124–25, 128, 135, 145, 149, 162, 172, 198, 239, 275 Onto-typology xii, 32, 36, 39, 114, 121–22, 162, 172, 175, 197, 199, 275 Opium Wars 169 Opposites eternal struggle of 186 law of the unity of 179 Opposition, abstract 135 Organic aesthetics 223 Organism 254 biological 174 Original Sin 11, 31–34, 126–27 doctrine of 34, 126 Pagan cosmology 236 Paganism 236 Para-humanity 116, 171 Particularism 65 Particularity 152, 155, 158 concrete 142, 155 unique 157 Peasant background (zhuangjia dizi) 278 Pedagogy x Pentagon 245 People-ness (naródnost) 163 People’s Liberation Army 246 Perception aesthetic 225 pre-intellectual 145 Perfectibility 135 doctrine of human 136 Philosophical aesthetics 18, 28, 66, 87, 132, 167, 186, 233 human 44 modern Chinese 174 modern post-Kantian 169 organic 223 post-liberation 223 socialist realist 205 Philosophy-literature-criticism x, 18, 38, 120, 233 Physiognomy 196 archetypal 196 intellectual 185 Pickowicz, Paul 92, 97, 177 Plato 122, 167, 172 Symposium 185

Plekhanov, Georg 92–93, 96, 223 orthodox Marxist 96 Poiesis 58, 73, 128 modern 275 Polytheism 34 Popular sovereignty 271 Positivism 33, 128–30, 132–33, 137–38, 140, 166 modern sciences 140 philosophy 130, 137 sciences 26, 129, 132 Positivist 93, 129, 138 Postcoloniality 22, 114, 168–69, 171 Postcolonial Studies xv, 114, 171 Poststructuralism xi, 8, 12, 20, 41, 43–44, 45, 52, 64, 69, 81, 97, 233 Poststructuralist literary theory 27 Pound, Ezra 20 Praise for the Red Plum Blossom 237 Proletarian comradeship ( jieji you’ai) 259–62, 264 Proletariat 166, 210, 254, 261–62, 266, 268, 271 global 262 Protestant 34 Protestant Churches 126 Protestantism 126 Psychoanalytic criticism 63 Pulp literature 174 Pusey, James Reeve 250 Qian Zhongshu 22 Qiyue School 82 Qu Qiubai (Ch’ü Ch’iu-Pai) 97, 177

92, 94,

Race, human 171, 266, 276 Racial apartheid 146 Racial stereotypes 173 Racist biologism 174 Rahv, Philip 20–21, 130 Ransom, John Crowe vii, xii, 21–22, 33, 120–23, 126, 128, 130, 133, 135–36, 138–41, 143, 145–49, 151, 239 “Poet Without Laurels” 146 and Cai Yi 147 Rationality 61, 70, 137, 152, 231 scientific 138 traditional Chinese 72 Realism and allegory 66, 71 bourgeois 58 bureaucratic 49, 82

index critical 43 discourse of 44, 49, 60, 82 early 44, 56–57, 59–60 humanitarian 22 institutional 49–50 master discourse of 44 modern 227 official 82 revolutionary 43, 58 theoretical discourse of 49, 60 theory of 65, 86, 98 Realist aesthetics 49–50, 56, 59 Realist philosophical aesthetics 82 Reason (Vernunft) essence of 88 instrumental 130, 150, 153–54, 158 poetizing essence of 167 Red Classics (Hongse jingdian) viii, 7, 235, 237–38 novels ix Red Crag (Hongyan) viii–ix, 38, 135, 158, 235–46, 248–49, 251–52, 254–58, 260, 262–69, 271–73, 278 Redfield, Marc, Phantom Formations 2, 13, 16–17, 37–39, 78, 115, 124, 162, 164–65, 187, 235–36, 272–74, 276, 278 Red Guard 73, 97 Reflection, aesthetic 150, 152, 208, 259 Reflection theory ( fanyinglun) 48 Reification 24, 47, 54, 72 Religion 34, 77, 93–94, 99, 123, 127, 139, 145, 175, 196, 271 and Anatoly Lunachrasky 94 common 122 Renaissance 14 Revenge, and Ah Q 102, 107, 109 Revolutionary, subject-information 269, 276 Revolutionary heroism 206, 235, 257, 276–77 Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism 203 Revolutionary romanticism 50, 203 Roberts, Julian 106 Romanticism 15, 76–79, 237 Rosenberg, Alfred viii, 166, 171–73, 198 anti-type 171–74 Aryan type 198 race form (Rassengestalt) 166, 172 soul form (Seelengestalt) 172

Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer Rou Shi 96 Ruo’ao 104 Russian criticism 97 Russian Formalists 223

313 93

Sakai, Naoki xv, 65, 267–71 “Subject and Substratum: On Japanese Imperial Nationalism” 267–71 Tanabe Hajime 270 Sang Hu 57 Scar Literature (Shangba wenxue) 30 Schelling, Friedrich 75, 79 Schiller, Friedrich 162, 210, 276 Schlegel, August 76 Scholl, Sophie 270 Schopenhauer, Arthur 86, 164 Schwartz, Benjamin 12 Sculpture, classical Greek 228 Second Department (Erchu) 254–57, 259, 263 Secular humanism 32–33, 35 Secularism 134 modern 127–28 Self-consciousness 13, 61, 76–77, 210 empirical 77 revolutionary 210 Semi-colonialism 22, 139, 143, 170 Semi-feudalism 22, 139, 143, 170, 206 Semiotics 45 structuralist 14 Sensibility xi, 1, 115, 133 and Allen Tate 133 dissociation of 133–34, 146 Sensuous expression 225 Sensuous image-ness 224 Sensuous particularity 144 concrete 142 Shakespeare, William 194 Shao Lixin 88–90, 94–95, 275 Shen Congwen (Shen Ts’ung-wen) 22, 60, 62, 121 Shen Zui 249–50 Shepherd, George 116 Short Story Magazine (Xiaoshuo yuebao) 87 Shui Hua 243 Shu Xiu 230 Sino-American Special Technical Cooperative Organization (SACO) 240–44

314

index

Smith, Arthur H. vii, 5, 32, 34–37, 105, 111, 113–16, 124, 161, 170, 172, 248, 275 Chinese Characteristics 1, 5, 34–36, 113–15 Christian God 117 Christianity 36 Smith, Neil 175 Smith, Norman Kemp 32, 77 Social Darwinism 257 Socialist aesthetics 188, 233 Socialist realism 6, 8, 13, 18, 31, 42–43, 49, 51, 81, 158–59, 163, 175–76, 198, 233, 273–74, 278–79 modern Chinese 18, 237 novel 212 Socialist realist classics 7 Socialist realist literature ix–x, 7–8, 81, 119 Socialist realist novels 50, 81, 161, 165, 201, 205, 237, 258, 272 Solomon, Jon xv, 5, 35–37 “Sovereign Police and Knowledgeable Bodies” 5, 36–37 Song Guitang 210 Song of Youth (Qingchun zhi ge) viii–ix, 27, 39, 50, 81, 150, 201–3, 205, 207, 209–11, 213–15, 217–23, 225, 227–29, 231–33, 242 Soul, human 34–35, 124, 161 dialectical 233 Soul form (Rassengestalt) 172 Soul form (Seelengestalt) 172 Southern Agrarianism 146 Southern Agrarians 20, 46, 123, 126, 128, 132, 137–38, 146 and New Criticism 150 Southwest Bureau 249, 255 Sovereignty 252, 270 Soviet Socialist Realism 163 Soviet Union 92, 95, 202, 218 Spanos, William 32 Special Affairs Department (Tewu chu) 253 Speech act 73 Spirit, revolutionary 251 Stalin, Joseph 12 Stalinism 93 Stereotype 2 racist 173 Stirner, Max 90–91 Subject aesthetic 276 ethnic colonial 267

exemplary Chinese 39 human 14, 39, 70, 256 interpolated 104 post-Kantian 237 subaltern 46 universal 17 Subject, free 77, 80 Subjective-auto-formation 277 Subjective formation 124, 235–36, 245 historical 153 modern 78 Subjective identity 44 modern xii Subjective spirit (zhuguan jingshen) 142, 192 generalizing power of 182, 191 human 191 Subjective transformation 183 human 192 Subjectivity 30, 39, 49, 61, 76, 79, 139, 152, 166, 235, 268 human 50, 178, 238, 248 modern 46, 51, 236–37 modern literary 231 modern political 266 revolutionary 184, 266, 268, 271–72 universal 235 Sublation 212, 214 Sublime viii, 201, 208–9, 211–13, 220–21, 257 Sun Chuanfang 58 Sun Mingxia 265 Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian, Sun Zhongshan) 259 Takayama Chogyû 89 Takeuchi Yoshimi 65 Tanabe Hajime 267, 269–71 Logic of Species 176, 267, 270 Tang, Xiaobing 42–43, 45, 57, 85, 203 Tate, Allen xii, 20–22, 33, 120, 123–30, 132–38, 140–41, 147–49 Didactic and Critical Essays 125 Forlorn Demon 124–25, 127, 134 “Present Function of Criticism” 129 Reactionary Essays on Poetry 127 Terras, Victor 96–97, 223 Tertullian, early Church Father 98 Totalitarian 71, 129 domination 12 fascism 130

index Totalitarianism 129, 154, 157–58, 165, 168, 193, 195, 198, 236 Totalitarian system 201 Totality 3, 75, 172, 224 organic 219 Totalization vii, 60, 71 paranoid 72 and violence in Lu Xun vii, 60 Transcendence 35, 122, 162, 193–94 human 193 Trilling, Lionel 20 Tripartite Pact 167 Truth abstract 134, 137, 143 concrete 219 and reality 76 universal (pubian zhenli) 257, 269 Tuth, scientific 178 Twelve Southerners 133, 146 Type vii–viii, xii, 32, 87–88, 90–92, 95, 98–99, 109–11, 113–17, 121–22, 137–38, 161–79, 181–87, 190–99, 257–58, 275 absence of 172–73 active 109 aesthetic 175, 189 artistic 176–77, 182–86, 191–93, 196, 265–66 artist moulds 85 defective 172 degenerate 174 eidaesthetic 164, 178 human 183, 194–95 human-kind 194 literary 2, 87, 162, 164 lower-level 184 metaphysical 115 metaphysical determination of 166, 197 real 183 theory of 175, 177, 188 Type (dianxing) vii, xii, 2, 32, 36, 43, 87, 90–91, 117, 159, 162, 168–69, 184, 196–97, 257–58, 274–75 Typical character (dianxing renwu) 194 Typical environment (dianxing huanjing) 185 Typicality (dianxingxing) 91, 153, 177, 196 Typification 161 Typology vii, 98, 111, 276 metaphysical 117 Typus (type, dianxing) 90, 166, 168, 172, 274–75

315

Understanding (Verstand) 136, 204, 206, 219, 232 Universal Brotherhood, (shijie datong) 263, 266 Universal humanity 17, 163, 269, 271–72 Universalism 65 Universality 25, 38, 115, 142–44, 152, 158, 174–77, 180–81, 183–84, 186–87, 189–90, 192–93, 195–96, 236–37, 253, 264–66 conceptual 154 human 271 logic of 174–75, 189 modern 236, 272 Universals 154–55, 180, 192 moral 145 scientific 145 University 29, 187, 265, 273, 279 first world 4 modern 37, 164, 187–88 Van Norstrand, Albert D. 146 Vernacular modernism 163 globalized literary 164 Vernacular modernist literature 164 Vietnam 262 Voronsky, Aleksandr Konstantinovich 96 Wakeman, Frederic E. 240–41, 243–45, 262 Wang, David Der-wei 5, 11, 20, 26, 42–45, 47–48, 51–53, 55, 57–58, 60–82, 85, 96–98, 178, 211, 216, 277 Wang Ban ii, xv, 29, 80, 86, 203, 211, 216 Sublime Figure of History 29, 80, 86, 211 Wang Guowei 8, 30, 86, 164 Wang Hongwen 98 Wang Shiqing 49 Wang Xiaoyan 228, 232 Warren, Robert Penn 133, 146 Water Margin 7 Wellek, René 14, 28, 85 History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950 14–15, 85, 199 Whampoa Military Academy 259 White Rose 270 White Terror viii, 130, 149, 167, 235, 241, 247

316

index

Whitman, Walt viii, 161, 169, 171, 174, 176, 186, 188–92, 194–99 Complete Poetry and Collected Prose 188–89, 192, 195–96 Convertible Terms 188 Democratic Vistas 186, 189–90, 194–96 Specimen Days 188 and Mao Zedong 197 Williams, Raymond 14–15, 28 Wood, Allen 77, 162 World history (Weltgeschichte) 193 World literature (Weltliteratur) xiii, 2–5, 22–23, 199, 216 Wu, William F. 173 Wuxia, mentality 261 Xie Mian xv Xin Chao 87 Xu Dishan 124 Xu Ning 202 Xu Pengfei 250, 254–61, 263–65, 268–71 Xu Shoushang 6 Xu Wei 274 Xu Xiaoxuan 246 Xu Yuanju 249 Xu Yunfeng 235, 248, 257, 259–61, 263–65 Yang Mo 50, 202, 204, 207, 209–10, 212–15, 218, 222–24, 227–28, 232–33

Yellow Peril 114, 171, 173–76 Yellow Peril literature 171 Yuanmao Village 277 Yu Yongze 203–4, 212–18, 221–22, 227, 232 Zarathustra vii, 47, 87–90, 94–95, 99, 101, 106, 109, 113, 122, 166–67, 250 Zhang Aijing 265 Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) 22, 127 Cao Qiqiao 127 Golden Cangue ( Jinsuoji) 127 Love in a Fallen City (Qing Cheng Zhi Lian) 232 Zhang Shiying 12, 28–29, 201, 203, 219, 233 Lun Heige’er de ‘Luojixue’ 203 Zhang Tianyi 22, 51, 125 Zhang Wenqing 206 Zhang Xudong 30 Zhang Xueliang 246 Zhao Yulin 277 Zhazidong 241–42, 245–46, 254, 264–66 Zheng Defu 210 Zheng Jin 229 Zheng Zhenduo 164