1—
Introduction:
Writing about Others
In 1928 Lu Xun
The fearful thing about the Chinese literary scene is that everyone keeps introducing new terms without defining them.
And everyone interprets these terms as he pleases. To write a good deal about yourself is expressionism. To write largely about others is realism. To write poems on a girl's leg is romanticism. To ban poems on a girl's leg is classicism.
Lu Xun then goes on to recount a joke about two shortsighted rustics who fall to arguing over the inscription on a votive tablet; they ask a passerby to mediate their quarrel, only to be told, "There's nothing there; the tablet hasn't been hung yet."[1]
Lu Xun wrote "The Tablet" at the height of the Revolutionary Literature debate of 1928, when he was under attack from a clique of left extremists who found his work and political stance insufficiently militant. Understandably, Lu Xun felt embattled, besieged by dogmatists who viewed literature exclusively through the lenses of theories that were themselves mutable and ill-defined. He saw the literary revolution in which he had played such a crucial role being turned into a mock-heroic battle of isms, a noisy polemical fracas about a literature that—in terms of creative output—had yet to materialize. Lu Xun was not alone in these concerns. At one time or other nearly every important author of the 1920s and 1930s decried the extent to which the discussion of literature in China had become saturated with theoretical abstractions. Shen Congwen
1930 the achievements of the New Literature movement, was struck by the gap that had developed between the theoreticians' recommendations and the content of the literary works actually being published; he frankly recommended that authors ignore the latest "news from the literary scene" and attend instead to their writing and to life.[2] But such a detached attitude was easier to recommend than to achieve; as Lu Xun's exasperated tone in the passage quoted above suggests, the theoreticians had become too assertive to ignore.
The apparently inflated power accorded to theory in modern Chinese letters can only be understood in the context of the cultural emergency from which the new literature was born and in light of the particular kind of literary borrowing in which Chinese intellectuals were engaged. Lu Xun observed in another essay that "revolutionary literature as it flourishes in China is quite different from revolutionary literature elsewhere; it did not arise in the high tide of revolution but developed because of a setback in revolution."[3] One could emend this to suggest that modern Chinese literature developed from a series of setbacks, beginning with the failed 1898 reform movement and continuing through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s. In the intervening years Chinese reformers suffered one disappointment after another. The 1911 revolution, which rid the country of imperial rule, awakened hopes that a strong, modern nation could finally be forged in China, but the republican government established to replace the monarchy rapidly crumbled, its authority usurped by warlords. Then, in 1919, China suffered international humiliation when the Western nations at Versailles decided to cede the province of Shandong to Japan, a decision that provoked the student demonstrations on May 4, the date by which the larger cultural movement of the late 1910s and 1920s is now known.[4] Finally, in 1927, the coalition between the Nationalist and Communist parties, on which many had pinned their hopes for finally achieving a unified national rule, was violently severed when Jiang Jieshi
[4] For a full history of the May Fourth movement see Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement .
paign of terror against the left wing of the alliance. The period that produced the new literature was thus a frankly traumatic one, during which repeated shocks and dislocations were visited on individuals and on the nation at large. Although in retrospect both faces of the Chinese revolution—political and literary—have taken on an aura of inevitability, it is worth remembering that the militancy of those days was bred in the frustration of repeated historical reversals.
Of course, modern Chinese literature did more than just mirror the chaotic condition of its age, for it had been burdened from birth with an enormous responsibility. Chinese intellectuals resolved to remake their literary culture only after their efforts at political reform had failed, and they did so with a specific purpose in mind. They reasoned that literature could reach a deeper level of cultural response than political manipulation had succeeded in doing; a new literature, by altering the very worldview of its readers, would, they hoped, pave the way for a complete transformation of Chinese society. Increasingly challenged by the West, they scanned Europe's diverse cultural weave for the strand that held the secret of its "wealth and power"; in their haste they eagerly seized on the isms by which Westerners categorized their own tradition. These offered a necessary grid through which to view the vast quantity of new ideas and new information that suddenly became available when the doors to the West were opened. May Fourth intellectuals did not have the luxury to slowly explore the philosophical and social ramifications of each system of thought or artistic genre they encountered. A sense of national crisis mandated their borrowing, and they approached their task with a keen sense of urgency, believing that China's future rested on the models they chose.
Of the terms that Lu Xun mockingly defines in the passage quoted above, realism came to carry the profoundest burden of hope for cultural transformation. And realism generated the largest body of literature in the years that followed, a corpus that has since been recognized as the crowning achievement of twentieth-century Chinese literature both by Chinese critics and by such scholars in the West as Jaroslev Prusek[*] and C. T. Hsia. No other term has had such a decisive influence on modern Chinese criticism and fiction. As I shall detail in chapter 1 of this study, many of the dominant figures of the May Fourth movement were advocates of realism, and during the 1920s the reformist literati split into two factions, one characterized as realist, the other as romanticist. Late in that decade this rift evolved into a
violent clash between realist and romanticist leftists, a skirmish that in many ways set the stage for the various literary controversies of the 1930s and 1940s. And these controversies in their turn determined the literary policies of the People's Republic when it was established in 1949. As a result the term realism continues to have considerable rhetorical—and political—bite in China today: the literature of each major period of political thaw (including the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1956–57 and the post–Cultural Revolution period) has been applauded as a salutary return to the "realist" tradition of preliberation fiction.[5]
In the West, the word realism has a very different recent history. For Western critics it has become one of those embarrassing critical terms that seem to invite typographical alteration; more often than not they set off the word with quotation marks, capitalization, or italics, thereby hoping to dissociate themselves from the now thoroughly discredited epistemology the term assumes. Where critics speak easily of classicism, expressionism, or even romanticism without arousing suspicions that they have fallen into an uncritical endorsement of the mode and the theoretical presuppositions that support it, recent discussions of realism invariably open with a defensive qualification of terms.[6] 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 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: too often they involve a reductive view of the text as mere social documentation or, in the didactic tradition of Marxist criticism, as an illustration of the tenets of social ideology.
[5] See the discussion of the new realism of the post-Mao period in Lee Yee, The New Realism , pp. 3–16.
[6] George Levine, for example, begins his recent book on English realism with a quotation from Thomas Hardy: "Realism is an unfortunate, an ambiguous word, which has been taken up by literary society like a view-halloo" (Levine, The Realistic Imagination , p. 3). Levine goes on to argue that, although the concept of realism seems incompatible with the antireferential bias of contemporary criticism, realists in fact anticipated modernism by giving representation in their fiction to profoundly disruptive social and psychological forces. See especially pp. 3–22.
Recent Western critics of modern Chinese literature, sensitized to the philosophical difficulties attending discussions of literary mimesis, have grown loath even to discuss realism. Since the work of Hsia and Prusek[*] the most ambitious Western treatments of May Fourth literature have focused on other, more marginal currents in the period's literary history.[7] Edward Gunn, in his survey of literature written in occupied zones during the Sino-Japanese war, goes so far as to invent a critical term, antiromanticism , that he defines so precisely by traits commonly associated with realism (specifically, a concern with the familiar and a tendency to dramatize the failure of certain "individuals' pretensions and their ill-conceived, unreflective ambitions")[8] that I can only assume it was formulated to allow the circumvention of the more familiar but now suspect term realism .
The special treatment Westerners accord to the word may be the sign, however, not of their overmastering realism, but of their continued susceptibility to its spirit. In spite of their reservations, realism still exerts a powerful normative hold over the Western literary imagination. Even such contemporary experiments as le nouveau roman and American documentary fiction, it could be argued, struggle to escape from the formal problems associated with realism and end defining themselves by it, if only negatively. Moreover, as George J. Becker has observed, the twentieth century has seen several cases of "the resurgence of realism in countries long subject to repressive intellectual and artistic forces."[9] However convincing the refutations of nineteenth-century realist theory may be, they in the end fail to explain either the continued historical productivity of the mode or the lingering rhetorical power of the term itself. Particularly in a case like China, where debate about realism has played such a crucial role in the development of a major literary genre, we are not served by suppressing the term but rather by confronting and critically examining the complex of associations surrounding it. My intention in undertaking here a reconsideration of modern Chinese fiction from the perspective of its most ubiquitous ism, is not, however, to further augment the weight of dogma that beset Lu Xun or to create a sterile taxonomy of the
[7] Major examples would be Leo Ou-fan Lee's Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers , Perry Link's Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies , and Edward Gunn's Unwelcome Muse .
[8] Edward Gunn, The Unwelcome Muse , p. 271.
[9] George J. Becker, Documents of Modern Literary Realism , p. 20.
period's literary products. I will instead begin by performing a kind of archaeological investigation of the term's usage from its introduction into China at the turn of the century through 1942, when Mao Zedong
After considering what the term itself meant to the Chinese, I will examine the influence of realism on the writing of several major Chinese authors. Doing so will immediately expose the considerable gap that developed between the logos of May Fourth criticism and the mythos of the period's fiction. The various literary programs shared a view of writing as a simple, willed activity, the directed and manipulable product of certain daylight intentions. But fiction did not prove so tractable to the intentions, whether ideological or literary, of China's authors during its actual composition. They frequently discovered their own inspirations to be troubled and nocturnal and the fate of their fiction in the world, once severed from its creator, to be unexpected, even perverse (a fact brought home to many of the authors discussed here by the belated criticism heaped on their works during the Cultural Revolution). As often as not, works written according to a literary program failed to satisfy the most basic expectations of its promoters, and works that did succeed artistically or rhetorically eluded simple critical categorization. Though an examination of May Fourth literary criticism is useful in exposing the extent of the period's intellectual crisis as well as the nature of the constraints that the resulting literary factiousness exerted on authors—and I proceed with such an examination in chapter 1—an adequate account of the period's fiction must rely on more than the interpretive categories suggested by its criticism. I will attempt to remedy this in part by reference to recent advances in narratology. But relying on theoretical props designed to assist the study of Western literature can carry us only so far, and I propose to turn for more pertinent help to the fictional texts themselves. Reading the oeuvre of any of the major Chinese realists of the
1920s or 1930s, one is struck by their high degree of formal self-consciousness. Again and again authors introduce frankly reflexive elements into their work, often in the form of authorial alter egos or ironical foregrounding of the very techniques that identify their works as realist. In chapters 2 through 4, I will read major examples of May Fourth realism as metafiction in the belief that the works themselves can best instruct us in how they are to be read. Indeed, my premise is that many realist works operate on two levels, one of "objective" social representation and one of self-conscious allegory. At the allegorial level authors explore the resources and the limitations of the form in which they write; by examining this level, we can uncover the works' stresses and faults, the pitfalls that authors must dodge as they accommodate their material to specific formal restrictions. If allegory, understood in this way, may be said to inform all realist fiction, it asserts itself most insistently in the works of writers like those of the May Fourth period, who were self-consciously adapting an alien artistic form to cultural and historical needs substantially different from those that inspired the form's invention.
Such an interpretive strategy does not simply view realism as a set of positive characteristics but attends instead to its contradictory, problematic features, that is, to the questions that the project of realism raises. This strategy also takes us beyond the traditional focus of critical attention in discussions of realism, the text's claim to mirror an extraliterary reality. Clearly this claim cannot be ignored: all realist fiction gives itself authority by asserting a privileged relationship with reality. Yet the claim is not simply a passive, a priori assumption but also a formal determinant whose operation is discernible in all examples of the mode. Each new work must reproduce the claim in its own right, thereby affirming its singular command over reality. It should therefore be possible, while suspending intractable epistemological questions, to examine the act of representation as a kind of intellectual labor (or, in linguistic terms, as a motivated speech-act) whose characteristic traces may be discovered in the text. The real may, at least provisionally, be viewed simply as an effect of the fiction. 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 the 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).[10]
It is through a careful examination of these last two categories, I will argue, that we can free ourselves from the epistemological blinders of realism's claim to truth and begin to understand its operation as an aesthetic form. In the rest of this introduction I will take up each of these categories in turn, with the object of constructing a model of realism that accounts for the full range of the aesthetic experience; I will then consider which aspects of this model coincide with, and which conflict with, the presumptions of traditional Chinese criticism. This project is fraught with risk because it requires a high level of abstraction and generality, and I must ask the indulgence of readers who feel toward contemporary literary theory much as Lu Xun felt in 1928 about his extremist critics. Theoretical abstractions in literary studies justify themselves by enriching our understanding of individual works, and my observations are intended only as a preparation for the readings that follow. But scholars have increasingly recognized the continued relevance of deep strains of traditional culture to the modern Chinese experience: to appreciate the unique promises, as well as the unique obstacles, that realism presented to modern Chinese writers we must first explore the internal operation of realism (not just its theoretical rationale) and then identify the points of resistance to the Western mode implicit in China's rich and sophisticated aesthetic tradition.
Poiesis:
The Generation of the Literary Experience
If one takes both of its elements at face value, the term realist fiction verges on being an oxymoron: fiction connotes the world of the imagination, which authors evoke through the active exercise of their powers of invention, whereas realism , by asserting an optimal equivalency of the text and the real world, implies the effacement of the author as creator. The ambiguity of the term is more than a linguistic accident, as the history of the realist novel demonstrates. Particularly in the early years of the genre's development, novels were regularly
[10] See the discussion of these three "fundamental categories of the attitude of aesthetic enjoyment" in Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics , especially pp. 34–35 and chapters 6–8 of Part A.
prefaced by the author's denial of a role in the tale's composition: the texts were presented to the world as documents trouvé (Samuel Richardson's Pamela ), as journalistic reports (Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ), or as transcriptions of factual oral accounts (Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders ). Authors introduced themselves as a work's editor or publicizer but never as the story's inventor. Such ruses served to create a distance between author and text that accorded the works a powerful sense of autonomy and legitimacy (and at the same time, of course, helped protect the authors from accusations that they were simply spreading malicious or frivolous lies). As the reading public became more sophisticated, authorial disavowals became conventionalized, and only the most naive of readers could have mistaken their intention. They persisted as a formal element, however, because they reflected the fundamental ambivalence of realist fiction, its uncertain relationship to both fact and fiction. Lennard J. Davis has, in fact, called the early English novel a "factual fiction," at once "a report on the world and an invention that parodies that report."[11] From this we may deduce a general rule: realism's claim of pure referentiality involves repudiating a work's origins in the imagination of the author—a denial, that is, of the work's fictionality. This claim is always, however, slightly disingenuous; sophisticated readers never accept it at face value but enjoy the work precisely because of its ambiguous status vis-à-vis the Real.
Realist fiction assumes a gap not only between text and author but also between individual texts and all earlier literature. Crucial to the truth claim of realism is the proposition that the work is directly imitative of life rather than derivative of other texts. This means that a realist text must not only deny its origins in the imagination of the author but disavow as well its indebtedness to traditional literary models; it must assert a fundamental novelty. This claim too is somewhat disingenuous; in fact readers approach a novel with fixed assumptions about the genre and recognize in individual works the influence of earlier writers. But to the extent that references to the literary tradition consciously surface in realist texts, they often do so in a satirical or parodic context. What is often termed the first true novel, Don Quixote , for example, may be read in large part as a travesty of the chivalric
[11] Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions , p. 212. Davis discusses "authorial disavowals" in early English fiction at some length; see especially chapters 6, 8, and 9.
romance, and many later works explicitly deconstruct the false ideals promoted by less "realistic" literature (Madame Bovary's life, for example, is a disastrous attempt to imitate the adventures she reads about in romantic novels). Harry Levin has written that realistic "fiction approximates truth, not by concealing art but by exposing artifice,"[12] and in an important sense realism's truth claim is dependent on this denunciation of other, more artificial genres. This affinity for parody and satire betrays, of course, a high level of artistic self-consciousness: though realism may appear to turn its gaze exclusively on the extraliterary world, it is not innocent of the literature that precedes it. But at least at the level of its theoretical rationale, realism would break its ties both with the imagination and with tradition and discover its origins in the author's critical, observing intellect.
The celebrated image of realist fiction as a mirror, though generally read as a metaphor for the direct translation of extraliterary reality into fictional material, is perhaps more interesting for what it shows us about the creation of the author's critical persona and the resultant indirectness of authorial expression in realist fiction. According to the metaphor, composition is merely the disinterested hoisting of the mirror; in Stendhal's famous passage in Le rouge et le noir the novel is compared to a "mirror walking down the road," reflecting everything—both the good and the bad—in its path.[13] But a mirror image at best marks off a discrete fragment of the real world with an artificial frame; this fragment then shifts with the perspective of the viewer. So too, the metaphor suggests, artistic representation of the world must be staged from a determinate perspective. This perspectivism, the point d'appui of such realist notions as "focalization" (or "point of view") and "authorial objectivity," is a philosophical and aesthetic stance unique to the modern West. Medieval and non-Western artistic traditions generally permit the creative imagination to range freely over the totality of culturally generated images. The traditional Chinese fu
[12] Harry Levin, The Gates of Horn , p. 51.
[13] Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1972), p. 414.
perspectivist descriptions, however, fix the object in a particular relationship with the observing subject, a relationship that is bound by strict temporal and spatial limitations. For the authorial voice to exceed these limitations is to stagger the mirror and thereby relinquish the authority of the critical observer.
Realism's high estimation of the critical observer's stance is anchored in Enlightenment faith in the capacity of human beings to free themselves from superstition and prejudice through the exercise of their faculty of reason. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has said, the fundamental "prejudice" (or prejudgment) of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself.[14] As an epistemological exercise, realist fiction might be viewed as an exploration of the process through which the mind assimilates external reality to the linguistic structures or prejudices by which it apprehends the world or, more potently, as an exploration of the process through which external reality forces a reconsideration of those prejudices. But the observing mind can discover its independence, can feel the power of its freedom, only at the moment of disengagement, when it sets itself in opposition to tradition. Realism's supposedly disinterested investigation of the external world thus reveals itself to be an internal struggle to free the mind from its dependence on the received tradition. Just as subjects can establish their integrity only through a critical gesture of some kind, so too the truth claim of realist fiction is dependent on its self-presentation as a critique of cultural prejudices. This manifests itself in the work as an act of demystification: the realist plot invariably dramatizes the disappointment of conventional pretensions, desires, or ideals. The objectified real world, as the agent of these disappointments, plays a crucial role in the discrediting of cultural prejudices, thereby liberating the mind from the stranglehold of tradition. In the process the mind is divided into a rationalist objective element that aligns itself with an ahistoric higher consciousness (or, in the Marxist-Hegelian tradition, with the full consciousness of a "higher historical stage") and an opposing subjective element, which is heir to the unreasoned biases of tradition. The objectivity of realism thus somewhat paradoxically elevates the subject (as an independent platform of observation) while censoring those emotions and prejudices that we usually think of as an individual's subjectivity.
[14] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method , pp. 239–40.
Authorial disavowal of subjective involvement in the creative process has the effect of focusing attention on the literary artifact itself, divorcing it from the circumstances of its production, and according it a unique substantiality. As an art object , the work may be compared with and finally set in a hierarchical relationship to the reality it purports to copy. Approached in this way, a work of art cannot but appear dubious, for however expertly it mimics reality, it can never truly replace that reality. Plato's suspicion of the arts, which necessitated the later Western formulation of a defense of poetry, follows from this elemental sense of art as imitation of the real world. Traditional Chinese aesthetics, which never developed a theory of mimesis like the one that has dominated Western discussions of the arts,[15] did not hypostatize the art object in this way. For the Chinese a work of literature was not a copy of the natural world but one of many manifestations of the fundamental patterns that underlie both the natural and social worlds. This view was most forcefully expressed in the writings of the sixth-century theorist Liu Xie
[15] For a discussion of the lack of mimetic theories of literature in China see James J. Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature , pp. 49–73. William F. Touponce, in a spirited critique of Liu's book ("Straw Dogs: A Deconstructive Reading of the Problem of Mimesis in James Liu's Chinese Theories of Literature," Tamkang Review , no. 1 [Summer 1981]: 359–90) takes issue with Liu's claim that mimesis has not played a significant role in Chinese literary thinking, but his argument confuses René Girard's fundamentally anthropological concept of mimesis (Girard argues that sacrifice is the miming of the original act of violence that underlies all culture) with Plato and Aristotle's concept of literary mimesis (which takes Poetry as an imitation of the phenomenal world). A connection might, no doubt, be drawn between the two (and Girard unquestionably believes his to be related to Plato and Aristotle's), but this connection needs to be carefully articulated. Touponce is forced finally, in an unobtrusive concessional phrase, to concede that "China may be said not to have produced any mimetic theory of literature" (p. 384). This is, of course, precisely Liu's point.
[16] Liu Hsieh (Liu Xie), The Literary Mind , pp. 9–10.
tion. . . . The writer, instead of 're-presenting' the outer world, is in fact only the medium for this last phase of the world's coming-to-be."[17]
Liu Xie's argument confounds the notion of an origin of writing by suggesting that writing / pattern in some sense precedes and yet is derived from human consciousness. His argument amounts, in fact, to suggesting an equivalency between writing and consciousness, which Liu goes on to make yet more explicit: "'Words with Pattern' [i.e. writing] are the mind of the universe."[18] The literary work, a manifestation of human consciousness and of universal pattern, can never be reduced to a mere shadow of the real world, as it was for Plato; its ontological sufficiency is never open to doubt. Chinese aesthetic philosophers thus concerned themselves little with the mimetic relationship of art object to real world but instead directed their attention to the affective and didactic capacities of art, its power either to awaken in readers the range of emotions that motivated the work's composition or to reveal to readers the network of "principles" that were thought to support both the natural and social worlds. However, Chinese were not uninterested in the creative process as experienced by the individual author: indeed, expressive theories of literature (epitomized by the endlessly repeated maxim "Shi yan zhi "
If the Chinese tradition did offer an intellectual framework with which to consider questions of the artwork's relationship with the external world, it was provided by the neo-Confucian concept of the
[17] Stephen Owen, Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics , p. 20. Andrew H. Plaks also discusses this passage and its relevance to the development of fiction in "Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative," in Plaks, ed., Chinese Narrative , pp. 309–52; see pp. 311–16.
[19] For a discussion of expressive theories of literature in China see James J. Y. Liu, Chinese Theories of Literature , pp. 67–87.
"investigation of things"
Though sometimes thought to reveal a commitment to objectivity or realism, such literary applications of the concept of gewu as that in Jin Shengtan's
exercise of these virtues one recognizes that all things, even the lowliest thief or rat, spontaneously express the inner necessity of their being; if that being, the creature's nature, can be grasped, the artist's finished work will achieve an air of authenticity. Jin's argument is clearly less a call for scientific observation of the external world than for spiritual identification with the objects and beings that inhabit it, that is, for a kind of negative capability. In a manner typical of Chinese criticism, Jin Shengtan focuses on the interaction between author and world prior to composition rather than on the relationship of the work's content, once realized, to the external world. Metaphorical use of the mirror in Chinese aesthetic philosophy illuminates this fundamental difference from Western aesthetics: in Chinese writings the mirror is never equated with the work itself as a reflection of the Real, but with the mind of the author, who through contemplation rids himself (or herself) of a clouded subjectivity and opens himself as a free channel to the Dao (Tao).[23]
Catharsis:
The Efficacy of Literary Communication
As is often observed, Western realism is a bourgeois art form that succeeds by appealing to its readers' sense of historical and social identity. René Wellek has noticed, in connection with the nineteenth-century realist novel, the importance of such historical upheavals as the industrial revolution, which brought a new awareness of history—
"the far greater consciousness that man is a being living in society rather than a moral being facing God"—as well as a "change in the interpretation of nature which shifts from the deistic, purposeful, even though mechanistic world of the eighteenth century to the far more unhuman, inhuman order of deterministic nineteenth-century science."[24] At the most fundamental level, realist fiction assumes a shared sense of historical progression: both author and reader conceive of the events related in the text as particular, discrete occurrences plotted on a linear temporal course—that same temporal course, in fact, that encompasses all our lives and that we call history. This particularity of events is no more than a pretense, as the theorists of realism themselves concede in their discussion of "typicality," where they indirectly acknowledge the conventionalized and even allegorical nature of realist fiction. Through the notion of types, realism is opened to the transmission of general truths (i.e. ideology) and the encyclopedic portrayal of social reality. Realist fiction, like all narrative art forms, thus presents itself in part as a kind of instruction or teaching,[25] yet unlike a fable, parable, or religious allegory, it is never the transparent vessel of its message. To read a work of realism as a straightforward roman à thèse , reducing the text's content to its schematic ideological message, is to overlook the unique creative tensions that inform it. Realist fiction is forever at pains to distinguish its use of language from more dogmatic or discursive usages, often through slighting references to such language and the texts that embody it (we shall examine some of these as they occur in May Fourth fiction, but examples from Western realism are equally abundant). For however conventionalized the events portrayed in realist fiction, the text's claim to capture and relay a specific, unrepeatable slice of life remains crucial to its effectiveness: the text refers its authority to the external world by this means, thereby appearing not to be applying its structures of meaning to the world, but to have discovered them there.
One way that realism persuades us of the particularity of its content is the inclusion of apparently nonfunctional details that contribute descriptive richness to the work but seem to contribute nothing to its instructional purpose. Roland Barthes, in his essay on the "reality effect," cites a passage in Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" in which a piano
[24] René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism , p. 254.
[25] On narrative as instruction see Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du roman , pp. 21–22.
is described as supporting "under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons." The barometer appears to be a "futile" detail, telling us nothing of relevance to the human drama for which we read the story. Even such details, however, are not purely mimetic but serve as signs enunciating the text's desire to align itself with the category of the Real. They communicate a sense of tangible reality, Barthes argues, because of their "resistance to meaning," which "confirms the great mythic opposition of the true-to-life (the lifelike) and the intelligible ." In the ideology of the modern age "reference to the 'concrete' . . . is always brandished like a weapon against meaning."[26] Details like Flaubert's barometer are therefore pivotal to our understanding of realism's truth claim: although they may appear random or arbitrary, their opacity invites our indulgence in the "pure fascination of the image"[27] and thereby persuades us of the authenticity of the world represented in the fiction.
But if the Real made itself felt in the text at no more than this local level, it would be experienced only as a supplement to the thematic intentions of the work. The Real has instead a more powerful formal role to play in the text as the agent of demystification . Like the mimetic details discussed above, the demystifying agent resists orderly absorption into the world of the fiction, and its irruption signifies the destabilizing presence of chaos, chance, and the arbitrary. Certain recognizable topoi , consisting largely of those unassimilable elements of nature that confound the efforts of the imagination to reorder the world, may be recognized as the primary demystifying agents in realist fiction: hunger, violence, disease, sexual desire, death. All exert powerful constraints on the subject and significantly operate directly on his or her physical being. In realist metaphysics it is always the body that is accorded substantiality, and as the list indicates, it is above all those features of the natural world that invasively trespass the imagined autonomy of the body that achieve status as emblems of the Real. Since their very materiality empowers them, all such agents appear in their essence to be closed off to language, which is powerless to avert the threat they represent to the body. In a sense, the text itself, as a linguistic construct, is helpless before them; perceived as external to language, the Real and its agents are finally unrepresentable and can
[26] Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language , p. 146.
[27] Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production , p. 58.
at best be pointed to. Not their direct representation, but their effect on the world of the fiction—the spectacle of demystification—constitutes the work. The Real is thus experienced in the text on one level as resistance and limitation and on a more profound level as the threat of indeterminacy of meaning—as the "unnameable."[28]
While the introjection of the Real into the world of the fiction serves the necessary function of prying the critical mind loose from the hold of tradition and thus creating a privileged platform of observation, its presence as the unnameable would appear to threaten disrupting the work's formal stability. The spectacle of demystification is, after all, one of pure negativity, which unchecked could lead only to self-destruction and the dissolution of the aesthetic experience. But the production of an art work is an assertive act, however disguised or hesitant, that entails the creation of an objectively binding meaning; pure negation can never serve as the sole support of a creative act.[29] The use of the Real to induce disillusionment must therefore be seen as only the critical first part of its role in realist fiction. The text would, in the strategic rhetoric of the mode, go on to capture the Real, to contain or domesticate it. But such terminology suggests that internalization—and hence domination—of the Real may better be understood as its banishment; at moments of closure the text projects the Real, with its threat of indeterminacy and chaos, back into the external world and thus reconstitutes itself as a stable system of meaning. Doing so amounts to the text's reestablishing a linguistic reign over the world, to its redefining the Real as the benign product of human endeavor, as determinate language. But in fact, with this gesture of banishment the text revives the distinction between the internal world of the fiction and the external world of the Real and its agents.
With the expulsion of the Real, the aesthetic response generated by realism reveals its similarity to the experience of catharsis that Aristotle believed tragedy instilled in its audience. Realism, like tragedy, performs a ritualistic purgation of the reader's emotions, specifically sympathetic identification with the figures portrayed (pity) and revulsion from the events represented (terror). Certainly much of the aesthetic satisfaction to be derived from realism depends on the arousal
[28] George Levine takes the creation of Frankenstein as the model of realism's flirtation with the "unnameable." See The Realistic Imagination , especially pp. 28–29.
[29] In this connection see Hans Robert Jauss's critique of Theodor Adorno's "aesthetics of negativity" in Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics , pp. 13–21.
and subsequent evacuation of these powerful emotions. But in the reception of the mode, what use is made of this experience? Rousseau was perhaps the first to complain that the cathartic capacity of art operated to maintain the status quo, that its effect was "limited to intensifying and not changing the established morals."[30] Like an act of sacrifice, the ritualistic rehearsal of the subdual of chaos and the inauguration of social order serves only to reaffirm that order and excuse the violence of its creation. Unlike more didactic forms of narrative, which may end with a moral injunction to alter one's actions and thereby change the world, realism would appear to lead only to a private experience of reconciliation with inalterable realities.
Aristotle developed his doctrine of catharsis, it will be remembered, in response to Plato's condemnation of Poetry as mere imitation of the world of appearances. Poetry, in Plato's view, inevitably gravitated toward the "imitation of calamity and recollection of sorrow," thereby stimulating an irrational pity that spreads from poet to audience as if by contagion.[31] In his defense of the arts, Aristotle argues that Poetry, through the cathartic purging of pity and terror, in the end serves to reinstate the higher claims of reason (and philosophy) in the human community.[32] Chinese aesthetic philosophers, lacking a theory of mimesis, likewise found the defense implied in the notion of catharsis unnecessary. Just as the literary artifact stands in a different relation to the referent in the Chinese tradition, so too is the work's connection to the emotional life of both author and reader perceived differently. Poetry is for the Chinese not a mediated objective correlative that, however skillfully the author employs the technique of his or her art, remains the weak shadow of a private subjectivity; it is rather a clear vessel through which stream emotions that are thought to be essentially shared and public. As the manifestation of communal and univer-
[30] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Politics and the Arts. Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre," quoted in ibid., p. 105.
[31] Calamity is, for Plato, the natural subject of imitation, since "the wise and calm temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to appreciate when imitated." See The Dialogues of Plato, The Republic , book 10, p. 481.
[32] It is worth observing that both Plato and Aristotle discuss mimesis in an essentially ethical context. In fact, for Aristotle the actions imitated in a work of literature are the object of a priori ethical judgments: "The objects the imitator represents are actions, with agents who are necessarily either good men or bad—the diversities of human character being nearly always derivative from this primary distinction" (The Poetics , p. 224). With this ethical concern Plato and Aristotle show a stronger kinship with early Chinese theoreticians than do later Western thinkers, who generally discuss the problem of mimesis in purely epistemological terms.
sally available human emotions rather than private, antisocial passions, poetry is thought to tap directly the fundamental human instincts, which, at least in the dominant Mencian branch of Confucianism, are believed to be benign and social. No contradiction follows from the simultaneous advocacy of the investigation of principle in things and an emotive theory of literature because emotion (qing ) and principle
The high value accorded poetry in the Chinese tradition is evidenced in Confucius's high praise for the Shi jing
[33] Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind , pp. 246–47.
[34] James J. Y. Liu writes:
The pragmatic concept of literature remained practically sacrosanct, so that critics who basically believed in other concepts rarely dared to repudiate it openly, but paid lip service to it while actually focusing attention on other concepts, or interpreted Confucius's words in such a way as to lend support to nonpragmatic theories, or simply kept silent about the pragmatic concept while developing others. (Chinese Theories of Literature , p. 111)
rhetoric are skills; the Way and virtue are realities."[35] As the vehicle of the Dao, literature was not a tool for the creation or discovery of new truths but a channel for the transmission of "realities," by which is meant the fundamental moral principles that underlie civilization.
In the West, classical mimetic theories, post-Cartesian epistemological attitudes, and nineteenth-century ideas about history combined to forge an evolutionary view of artistic development, which was endorsed by the promoters of realism and is still current today: new artistic forms are continuously generated in an effort to more nearly approach an ever-elusive external reality. Lacking a theory of mimesis, Chinese aesthetics developed a tenacious classicism; at least within the dominant Confucian tradition, the literati universally proclaimed the canon defined by Confucius to be the final repository of human wisdom and judged later works by the degree to which they approximated the spirit or form of the classics. From this classicism followed a taste for textual hermeneutics, which placed the burden on the interpreter to complete through study the meaning suggested by the text. The object of such study was to recover comprehension of the expressive situation that produced the text or, more profoundly, of the network of principles that operate through the text and of which it is a manifestation. Where an interpretive disturbance was recognized, it was imputed not to a representational inadequacy inherent in the text but to the inability of the interpreter to fully apprehend the significance of an abundantly sufficient text.[36]
Later generations of critics have accorded respectability to those genres of literary production modeled on the Five Classics. Of the
[35] Quoted in ibid., p. 114.
[36] It will rightly be objected here that both the Western and Chinese traditions are more complex than my argument allows, that I have limited my argument to Greek and Confucian schools of thought, ignoring Christian and Taoist alternatives within the two traditions. It is true that Christianity encouraged a hermeneutical tradition in some ways similar to Confucian classicism and that Chinese Taoists often showed a suspicion of language and linguistic attempts to grasp reality that seems at odds with my characterization of Chinese faith in linguistic manifestations of reality. But Christian thinkers share with the Greeks the notion of an ideal world behind or beyond the phenomenal world and transcending it; the arts, since their media are irredeemably a part of the phenomenal world, can at best hope to mimic what small part of the transcendent world is available to human understanding. Neither Taoists nor Confucians, however, sought to repudiate the phenomenal world through transcendence: for both, truth was immanent in the world. Confucians sought to live according to the principles that patterned the world, whereas Taoists sought a holistic perception of the world as it existed before it was differentiated into patterns by language. Language was suspect to the Taoists precisely because it was the instrument of that differentiation.
canonical works, only the historical writings, of which there are two, raise issues of narrativity and the representation of human actions in time. The first of these, Shu jing
Aristotle in his Poetics disparages the historian as nothing more than an imitator of the particular phenomena of the world of appearances, or "the thing that has been," while defending the poet, who calculates what is probable given certain universal truths and describes instead "the thing that might be."[38] As we have seen, in China history itself served the exemplary function Aristotle attributes to epic and
[38] Aristotle, The Poetics , pp. 234–35.
drama and as a result an independent raison d'être was never generated for fictive narrative forms. China's lack of an epic tradition[39] and the shackling of the Chinese mythmaking imagination, for which Confucian rationalism is frequently blamed,[40] left history the only indigenous model for narrative writing; not until the Tang dynasty (and then only after the arrival of extensive cultural influences from India) did fiction become fully differentiated from history. The uncertain bibliographical treatment traditionally accorded xiaoshuo
Despite this taint of spuriousness and triviality, Chinese fiction became increasingly autonomous and sophisticated over the course of the centuries and even found its champions. Yet in the eyes of most critics, Chinese fiction never shed the didacticism of its historiographical and philosophical models. C. T. Hsia, for example, has frequently observed the moralistic strain in Chinese vernacular literature
[39] See Jaroslev Prusek[*] , "History and Epics in China and in the West," in Prusek, Chinese History and Literature , pp. 17–34.
[40] See Zhang Haishan, "'Zi bu yu guai, li, luan, shen' pingyi."
[42] See Kenneth J. Dewoskin, "The Six Dynasties Chih-kuai and the Birth of Fiction," in Andrew H. Plaks, Chinese Narrative , pp. 45–66.
and lamented the failure of traditional criticism to discover "the therapeutic value of popular fiction in providing a vicarious outlet for a reader's repressed desires."[43] But as Hsia has also pointed out, some works of traditional fiction explore "repressed desires" with remarkable sophistication,[44] and it could further be argued that some, particularly from the late Ming and after, achieve powerful cathartic effects through the evocation of Taoist and Buddhist notions of transcendence. It is beyond the scope of this study to consider such works, but we may observe that where cathartic effects are achieved, they generally coexist with more secular, instructional aims. The ending of Gao E's
In summary, there are several points of marked contrast between the internal operation of realism and traditional Chinese aesthetic assumptions. Realism predicates for the author an autonomous platform of objective observation, a station that in theory is similar to that of the social scientist, and it operates on its readers through catharsis, by arousing and then purging the unpleasant emotions of pity and terror from their minds. In contrast, traditional Chinese literary theory was dominated by a notion of literature as the spontaneous expression of the author's emotional life; even when a place for observation was found in literary composition, it was understood as only a stage in a process of ethical cultivation. Moreover, the Chinese had no notion of catharsis and generally assumed that fiction (if not all literature) should serve didactic purposes. At both the creative and receptive ends, then, realism presented the Chinese with a fundamentally new model of aesthetic experience.
The term realism was introduced into China in two stages, first in
[43] C. T. Hsia, "Yen Fu and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao," p. 226.
[44] C. T. Hsia, "Society and Self in the Chinese Short Story," in his book The Classic Chinese Novel , pp. 299–321, especially pp. 307–8.
the context of the late Qing crusade for national restoration
Before going on to consider the theoretical arguments advanced both for and against realism by Chinese intellectuals, it is worth stopping to consider for a moment Lu Xun's facetious definition of the
term in "The Tablet": "To write largely about others
