6—
Reflections on Historical Totality and the Study of Modern Chinese Literature
Obviously we must know accurately a great number of minute facts about any subject if we are really to know it.
—Ezra Pound, "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris"
The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, "totalizing" character: as though you could not say one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system.
—Fredric Jameson, "Toward Dialectical Criticism"
We are well informed by our common sense that historical totality is only a working concept and no intellectual formulation can ever expect to fully encompass it. We stop certain things in the flow of concrete history and lift them out of their forever changing environments for scrutiny and analysis; meanwhile, the flow goes on its continuous totalizing process, invalidating any claim of wholeness. Historical completeness, which requires comprehensive coverage of all spatial and temporal extensions, and historical objectivity, which presupposes verifiability with the sum total of concrete events, can never be authentically achieved. Invariably, each history comes to us as a version , a mere version, incomplete and always partial, because only certain facts, believed to be significant, are chosen and high-lighted as if they can, indeed, represent the entirety of history. Thus, Pound, speaking of a "new method of scholarship" or "the Method of Luminous Detail," says:
Any fact is, in a sense, "significant." Any fact may be "symptomatic," but certain facts give one a sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effect, into sequence, and law. . . . In the history of development of
civilization or literature, we come upon such interpretating detail. A few dozen facts of this nature give us intelligence of a period — a kind of intelligence not to be gathered from a great array of facts of the other sort.[1]
Fredric Jameson, a totally different kind of critic, also emphasizes that any analysis must first isolate certain "dominant categories" that, seen as phenomena in dialectical interrelationship, will allow us "to see what something is through the simultaneous awareness of what it is not." The final moment must then deliver this abstraction back to the concrete world, "to abolish itself as an illusion of autonomy, and to redissolve into history, offering as it does so some momentary glimpse of reality as a concrete whole."[2]
To juxtapose Jameson, a dialectical critic, with Pound, whose historical consciousness is at best eclectic, is not to suggest that they share in any way the same philosophy of history. Rather, I want to point out this: In spite of their obviously different senses of hierarchy, they nonetheless have to come to grips with the same initial paradox in treating history: simultaneous admission of the limitation of thought before historical totality and their assertive desire to reach out and perceive, each in his own way, some semblance of wholeness through selected details.
It is clear that all historical studies must be considered provisional, inconclusive, and open for revision. It is this sense of seeing all efforts of historical formulations as provisional that will keep us in constant touch with the forever changing totalizing process. This sense of provisionality is thus linked with the full awareness of totality. When human beings lose sight of this sense, they are likely to gloss over totality and take partiality for wholeness. So, many large claims have been continuously pounded into our heads: Such-and-such a work is the "touchstone" of the spirit of the time, the most significant reinvention of tradition, and by tradition it is often meant that of the high culture, where, of course, the "artifice of eternity" and "absolute value" are supposed to be found. In certain cases, what is meant by "significant," "absolute," "mind of the first degree," all highly hierarchical terms, is to be verified by a set of standards put forth by some ancient authority of a particular culture. However, when applied anachronistically to another culture, such a set of standards is likely to prove quite arbitrary. This last statement is, of course, the central theme of my essay on the problems of the use of models.
But deeply ingrained in our consciousness is the danger of having
already formed a set of prejudgments; and these prejudgments, preclusive in nature, are somewhat ordained, as it were, by authorities of the past, who, themselves grounded in specific time and space, had abstracted from the totalizing process of all phenomena certain models of experiences that were then proclaimed as universally valid for all times. Whether we want to admit it or not, examples of prejudgments resulting from the lack of awareness of totality occur quite frequently.
Take the case of the history of Chinese literature. It designates only a history of Chinese literature produced mainly by "cultured" writers whose taste, sense of order, techniques, and aesthetic judgments have been conditioned by the system in which they find themselves. Very few of them view folk literature as serious literary "art." And when it should happen that some of the works of folk origins are included in the forest of literature, they are either "co-opted" or "culturized," valued according to the degree of their assimilation into the literary imagination of the cultured writers and critics. Although the imaginative formulation of the cultured writers originally might have been a refinement (often by an eclectic process of selection) of the embryonic folk mode of expression, many important aspects of the compositional reality of oral tradition indigenous to the spontaneous expressiveness of this so-called lower culture have been adulterated in the process.
In one sense, this is unavoidable. Culture is inevitably a process of filtering. The question is what this filtering process has done to wholeness itself. For even among studies of cultured works, this process has revealed some rather delimiting eclecticism. A ready example is T. S. Eliot's historical sense and his concept of tradition. We are told to embrace within our consciousness the entire body of literature since Homer, against which we can best judge our own work and see how and whether it will readjust the total order. Here, we are not to blame Eliot for not having included the Oriental horizons (Indian and Chinese, the existence of both of which he knew well enough before he made such a statement); for me, the total order (of cultured literary works) must at least include these two areas. Yet even within the Greco-Roman or European totality, Eliot's tradition is also extremely selective: only Dante, certain Elizabethan dramatists, metaphysical poets, and certain symbolist and post-symbolist practitioners are included.
What happens here is, of course, that when we are dealing with a poet-critic like Eliot, or, for that matter, any poet-critic at any
historical juncture of time, we are looking at one perception of a total order, one appropriation , and one set of conditions governing how this appropriation is conditioned and, to a large extent, determined by all the historical factors with which the poet-critic has to negotiate to establish individual talent. To criticize Eliot, we must have a sense of this still larger totality to fully understand the limitation of the wholeness he claims.
The sense of totality allows us to know that what has been omitted by a critic or critics of a certain class is not necessarily something of no importance; it was omitted because the dominant ideology had excluded it, or, to put it another way, it was excluded by a special interpretation of history. Yet a new interpretation of history at a different juncture of time might permit these omitted elements to resurface as dominant categories.
As we can see now, while documentation of the sum total of concrete history is impossible (leaving aside the fact that mere quantification of historical data rarely can pass for history in a qualitative sense of the term), awareness of totality is indispensable if we are to claim any kind of significance at all for the details we select as the most important moments in the total historical stretch and flow. Awareness of totality, coupled with a sense of one's view as provisional, will guard against the arrogance of taking the partial for the whole, of claiming completeness when only isolated phenomena have been dealt with. There is also this to be understood: We know all literary studies must be placed within historical time, but discussion of all related phenomena (social, economic, etc.) need not remain within that constraint, and, in fact, true understanding of the compositional reality of literary history must always move beyond a particular time, for all the phenomena that have come to us are results of growth from the past and contain seeds for their growth in the future. This is how tradition must be seen. The emergence or actualization of a traditional aspect in the midst of a new web of socioeconomic changes involves, necessarily, a study of its transformation — from its source strength as it had operated in the past to its current manifestation as it operates in the present. From a practical point of view, all literary studies must start with only a few sequences (as opposed to all sequences), since our minds can register just so much at one time. But the selected sequences must reflect the fact that they are selected only after they have been related in our awareness (not always in a fully articulated manner) to all the phenomena
available to us, including those inside and outside the particular historical period.
When we turn our attention to the studies of modern Chinese literature—works produced since the May 4th Movement—it is doubly important for us to possess, at all times, this sense of historical totality as understood above. The period since the May 4th Movement is one in which the conflict and negotiation between the Chinese and Western cultural models has been most intriguingly complex and in which the confrontation between them has deeply disturbed the native sensibility and its sense of order and value. In order to maintain their own raison d'être , the native intellectuals, playing the role of the oppressed, struggled and continue to struggle either to seek parallels in the imported models or to militantly assert the primacy of their indigenous mental horizon. Indeed, the confrontation of the two cultural models is a process of the interpenetration of past, present, native, and alien cultures, each of which has varying degrees of attraction or repulsiveness in the eyes of the Chinese people of today. Clearly, this complex process of becoming demands that we perceive each moment against the simultaneous sequences of historical events that have occasioned the dynamic and drastic changes in the midst of a somewhat blurred but stubbornly powerful native resistance.
Specifically, the search for a new cultural rationale, characterized by a radical rejection of the political-ethical-aesthetic order of the past and a large-scale transplantation of Euro-American ideologies and literary theories, was originally an attempt to free the Chinese people from domination both by the imperialistic foreign powers and by despotic native traditions and institutions. The scenario of this search consists of the following:[3] First, there appear highly emotional iconoclastic attacks on the Confucian autocratic monarchy, on the uncreative economy run by the gentry class (which had totally alienated the poverty-stricken peasantry), on feudal familial and societal customs and forms as well as on the classical language, literature, and thoughts that had once brought the Middle Kingdom supreme glory—all this in hopes of reestablishing China through institutional and social reforms (K'ang Yu-wei, Sun Yat-sen, Hu Shih, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, et al.) and in the name of a "renovation of the Chinese people" (Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Hu Shih, Ch'en Tu-hsiu, Lu Hsün, Mao Tse-tung, et al.). Second, early attempts are made to provide surrogates for the deposed culture by promoting Western knowledge
(practical, technological, and military) and scientific studies and, later, simultaneous transplantation (often indiscriminately) of liberalism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, individualism, Darwinism, Ibsenism (emancipation of women, in particular), socialism, Marxism, neoclassicism, romanticism, symbolism, aestheticism, naturalism, realism, futurism, expressionism, dadaism, revolutionary literature, proletarian literature, and so on. Third, the conflicts and debates rage over the questions of "Chinese spirit" and "Western substance"; the relationship of self to society and later to the party; and the significance of the scientific method; the doctrines of socialism, proletarian art, national form, and the suitability of socialist realism over critical realism. Fourth, running through these drastic changes were inbred violent events: the rapid destruction and unprecedented humiliation of the once inviolable China (unequal treaties, loss of territorial, economic, jurisdictional, and other rights) brought on by the gunboats of the Western aggressors, causing the Chinese to lose their national confidence, which seemed (and still seems to many now) to be irrecoverable; the ineffectual national resistance to the Western powers (from the Opium War to the Boxer Uprising) resulting in bloodbaths and national disgrace, pushing China to the brink of demise; a series of self-awakening revolutions (political, cultural, and literary) uniting the intelligentsia (urban intellectuals), students, and workers in street demonstrations and strikes (May 4, May 30) that successfully reversed the tides of foreign domination; and the revolutionary spirit born in these demonstrations, a spirit that finally helped the Chinese people carry through the fight against warlordism and against the Japanese invasion from the 1920s to the 1940s. Finally, in the midst of all these interpenetrating historical events and changes in consciousness, modern Chinese intellectuals have been caught in a love–hate relationship with both traditional and Western cultural modes.
Brief and oversimplified as it is, this scenario clearly shows that no single phenomenon from this complex process should be studied in isolation. The inseparability of historical consciousness and cultural-aesthetic forms necessarily calls for the study of a given phenomenon by comparing it with the total historical environment from which it emerges and within which it interacts with other constituents in some sort of tensional relationship.
Presently I will examine aspects of this morphological process, but first a few words about the difficulties created by contemporary Chinese politics. The internecine war between the Nationalist and
the Communist parties led to all kinds of wilful disinformation. For example, until very recently, for almost thirty-five years, there was no flow of books between mainland China and Taiwan. But for the intelligence agencies in these two areas, almost all the books published on one side were not available to the other. Worst of all, many key literary works and documents produced between 1919 and 1949 were either banned and destroyed on ideological grounds, as in mainland China, especially during the Cultural Revolution, or simply locked up, as in Taiwan. Ironically, only in the British Colony of Hong Kong was the situation slightly better, at least for those scholars deeply committed to reconstructing an effective historical sense of modern Chinese literature, for books published in both places after 1949 could sometimes be found there. But works produced between 1919 and 1949 were still scarce. This distress was partially relieved by the reprinting enterprise undertaken sporadically in the 1960s and 1970s by a few small bookstores. Again due to the self-imposed walls created by both the Nationalists and the Communists, these reprints rarely traveled between mainland China and Taiwan.
Stopping the flow of Chinese books and journals from the mainland, including those produced in Hong Kong, into Taiwan on the pretext of possible ideological infiltration was further complicated by the Nationalists' cultural program. The authorities there, wary until very recently of the iconoclastic spirit of the May 4th heritage, down-played the significance of the New Culture Movement and remained indifferent to the new literature. Their decision had the following consequences.[4] There was no department of modern Chinese literature in universities and no library holding of documents of this phase. In fact, books of the 1930s and 1940s were not seen anywhere except in a few guarded, locked-up libraries; even materials from the 1920s were scarce, and those available to the public had been carefully filtered. This is also true in the case of anthologies.[5] The various literary and ideological debates since 1919 were hardly known to college students, let alone the public, and the requests made by some intellectuals to the authorities to lift the ban on the works of the 1930s (condemned as being leftist) were repeatedly rejected. This resultant lack of effective historical consciousness has its sequelae. Thus, since the long overdue thaw came in 1987,[6] when for a few years pre-1949 books were reprinted (but by no means systematically) and books by current mainland Chinese writers were allowed into Taiwan, the responses have been anachronistically off-balance and off-mark. These works have been judged not within their proper historical
contexts but according to local hermeneutical habits developed within a specific historicity cut off from the larger fabric of modern Chinese literature. It will take many years before a fuller, more effective, and more comprehensive historical consciousness can be reconstructed in Taiwan.
Sequelae of a different sort, but equally distortive, occur in mainland China. Mao Tse-tung's straitjacket literary program, as spelled out in his famous 1942 Yenan Talks and his two earlier essays "The May 4th Movement" (1939) and "The Culture of New Democracy" (1940),[7] continues to possess writers and critics alike long after his demise.
Let us first look at Mao's streamlining of the writing of modern Chinese literary histories. Besides stipulating that all writers should write from the standpoint of workers, peasants, and party cadres and abandon all residual individualism and subjectivity of the urban petit bourgeoisie, he further insisted that the May 4th Movement is a "proletarian-led, anti-imperialist and anti-feudal culture of the broad masses." These dictates predisposed the narratives of almost all the literary historians after him. The official literary history by Ting I, for example, adhered most loyally to this argument. Ting found no room for the urban intellectuals such as Hu Shih and his friends, the entire Crescent Society and many theorists who contributed to the fermentation of the New Culture Movement, for they were, according to Mao, "traitor" writers. To institute Mao's directives, an orthodox format was worked out in 1951 by a committee consisting of Lao She, Ts'ai I, Wang Yao, and Li Ho-lin in a small book entitled Summaries for a History of Modern Chinese Literature for Teachers .[8] But when Wang Yao, one of the drafters of this program, tried in 1953 to make room in his big book, Chung-kuo Hsin-wen-hsueh shih-kao (Drafts for a History of Modern Chinese Literature), for Hu Shih, Hsü Chih-mo, and others, attempting, no doubt, to reach out for some form of historical totality, he was severely scathed. The charges included these: that he departed from Mao's directives and assigned a leading role to such urban petit bourgeoisie as Hu Shih and Ts'ai Yuan-pei and gave undue praises to Hsü Chih-mo and Lin Yu-tang without understanding that literature is a product of class struggle rather than of individual talents, failing, therefore, to portray the final defeat of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat; that he, by implication, did not subscribe to the view that literature exists to serve political struggle and that, by stating that "formulaism in art comes from formulaism in
life," he dared to criticize "party-mindedness" as well as question the foundation of Marxism-Leninism as being abstract and dogmatic; and that he condoned the subjectivism of Hu Feng and his gang.[9]
These views reflect the general tenor of most of the Chinese Communist critical studies; and Mao's insistence upon the proletariat as the true makers of literary history has colored the approaches of many Western literary historians, such as Huang Sung-k'ang and J. Prusek, in spite of their claims to scientific objectivity. Mao's strictures have also affected poetry anthologies. A good example is Tsang K'o-chia's Chung-kuo Hsin-shih-hsuan 1919–1949 (New Poetry in China, 1919–1949 [i.e., poems written before the creation of the Peoples' Republic of China], 1956), in which the omissions are, as expected, almost all the Crescent poets. Wen I-to, who had the strongest influence on Tsang, has only one minor poem included. Indeed, the works of many of the poets writing in the period 1930–1950, works that represent the best tensional dialogues emerging from the confrontation between native sensibility and intruding alien ideologies, had been buried by this trend. Only a few insignificant poems by the poets of the 1930s were included in the literary histories and critical notices written after 1949, and almost none of the creative and critical efforts by the poets of the 1940s were given a chance to voice themselves. The commitment of these poets to the making of individual styles and to the refinement of language as an art made it impossible for historians and critics in Communist China to mention their names without being severely criticized by the party.
In the realm of critical studies, Wang Hsi-yen's study of Lu Hsün, Lun Ah Q ho t'a-ti pei-chü (On Ah Q and His Tragedy, 1957), is quite typical. Wang must seek answers to three sets of questions to justify seeing Lu Hsün in Marxist-Leninist terms, although Lu Hsün's early stories were written before he leaned toward communism. The questions were (1) In Lu Hsün's stories of the May 4th period, are there elements of socialist realism? If there are, in what are these to be found? (2) From his collections from Outcry to Hesitation , is there any advancement in thought and in art? What is it? (3) Is there any national character in his polemic essays? What is the source of this national character? Wang finds in Lu Hsün a fighter who attacks the man-eating feudal systems. Although he also recognizes the early Lu Hsün as evolutionist, individualistic, lacking in party-mindedness, and without a scientific Marxist view, yet he must consider these early works as containing the necessary "seeds" of communist ideas.
With the second set of questions, Wang thinks Lu Hsün has begun to advance from identification with his petit bourgeois class to solidarity with the mass movement of workers and peasants, but the stories show that this is not true. To the third set of questions, Wang answers that Lu Hsün's essays are rooted in the Chinese soil.[10] Thus, we find that the complexity of Lu Hsün, a soul-searching individualist caught between public commitment (to progress, to science) and private vision (the search for meaning in a crisis of identity) and between his advocacy of the new and his deep-rooted love for the classical world, has been reduced to a mere ideological code. The Chinese Communist critics bypassed all the possibilities of dialectical complexity in the Marxist aesthetic and submitted themselves to a reductionist, conformist, and formulist approach, which is diametrically opposed to the historical consciousness of totality so central to Marxist criticism in the hands of its most enlightened practitioners.
This master narrative dominated and continued to dominate mainland Chinese critical opinion. For over thirty-five years, writers and readers alike have been directed and redirected by a party-guarded parent consciousness to a single mode of apprehending reality and a single mode of expression. This mode asks the writers to represent reality, in particular the external manifestations of the lives of workers, peasants, and soldiers, not as it actually is but as it ought to be, that is, according to the party's vision of a yet-to-be-realized socialist state, in which no form of darkness, fear, hesitation, and agony are supposed to exist. Consequently, there was only a monotone "singing" and a monotone of "critical voices." Indeed, even now, except for the enlightened few, many writers and critics have internalized this mode without seriously questioning it. This can be seen on many levels. But for our purpose here, let us look at three instances.
Many years into the post-Mao era, critics are still using the same rhetorical strategies. Typically, they would begin an essay by quoting Mao, aided perhaps by Marx, often out of context or half-understood, and would drone on for several pages, rehearsing many familiar party-ordained positions, before they would discuss some "real" issues. It is possible to distinguish two types of critics. The first type would attempt to assimilate new ideas into the orthodox Maoist-Marxist positions. ("Critic so-and-so's theory is not bad, but it should be substantiated by this or that aspect of Mao and Marx.") The second type is more shrewd. This type of critic either expands the Maoist-Marxist framework to such an extent that it can comprehend many
hitherto tabooed critical perspectives or infiltrates Maoist-Marxist terms with new ideas and in doing so subtly redirects the readers away from the fetters of the vulgar Marxism of the Chinese Communist party writers. The tension created in reappropriating political and ideological clichés for new strengths is a subject beyond the scope of this chapter and must be reserved for another occasion.
When, in the wake of the fall of the Gang of Four, novelists (in what is now known as the "Literature of the Wounded") and poets (in what is now known as the "Misty [Obscure] Poetry") attempted to awaken the memories of the suppressed and indeed despised populace, including those of some of the darkest moments of their minds, of their living conditions, and of the retrieval of the critical spirit as well as of self-awareness of the May 4th heritage, they encountered a huge barrage of criticism. Although these novels and poems survived and, together with the reissuance of the more art-oriented poets of the 1940s, have successfully retrieved for the public a larger arena for imaginative exploration, they have not been condoned by the party whose power of censorship is still at work, as can be witnessed by a series of controls instituted after the T'ien-an-men tragedy in 1989.
Some time after the fall of the Gang of Four, a few centers were established in designated provinces to study the literature of Taiwan and Hong Kong. In many of the studies and anthologies, especially the earlier ones, the same internalized censorship is operating. Critics unconsciously tried to frame the works from these two places in formulas prevalent in China. Consistently, they sought out those works that are closer to "the literature of peasants, workers and soldiers" and, following the vulgar Marxists' mechanical explanation of base and superstructure, dismissed all modernist attempts as decadent, formalistic, and typical of capitalist societies, without coming to grips with the historical specificity of Taiwan — a historical situation that has led to these kinds of works, not as replicas of Western modernist models but as a counterdiscourse to the then repressive atmosphere of the Nationalists.
We must admit, however, that the Chinese Communist or pro-Communist critics are historical, though perhaps biased and eclectic. It is their refusal to see their interpretation of history as provisional that has blurred their vision of totality. By the same token, those who claim to be ahistorical often turn out to be antihistorical also. Here, let us turn to the famous argument between Prusek and C. T. Hsia.[11] On the surface, it is a debate between a leftist and a rightist, but a
closer examination would reveal that it is a debate between historical and ahistorical approaches, although the historical stance represented by Prusek has pitfalls similar to those of the Chinese Communist line, as C. T. Hsia rightly pointed out. From Prusek's charges and C. T. Hsia's own confession, we can have some idea of the latter's ahistorical position:
There are certain tasks properly belonging to the literary historian which I could have undertaken were I not mainly concerned with what seems to me the basic task — a critical examination of the major and the representative writers of the period. . . . Thus, I have not systematically studied the relations between modern experiments in fiction and the native tradition. Thus, though I have ventured many remarks concerning the impact of Western literature upon modern Chinese fiction, I have made no systematic study of that impact. I have indeed cited many Western works in a comparative fashion, but primarily as an aid to define more precisely a work under examination and not as an attempt to establish lineage and influence. . . . I also have not attempted a broad comparative study of the normative technique employed by Chinese writers of fiction, though such studies . . . can be of definite value in assisting the task of evaluation. . . . [My] primary task is . . . discrimination and evaluation.[12]
Rejecting the thesis that the meaning or form of a literary work has its grounding in a historical base, Hsia proceeds to examine literary works as if, once created, they possessed some sort of autonomous status free from historical time. Like the New Critics who influenced him, he begins with a set of aesthetic assumptions that are supposed to be unquestionably universal: What is true of the great works in the West must also be true of the native products of China. We find him conjuring up the names of James Joyce, Hemingway, Matthew Arnold, Horace, Ben Jonson, and Aldous Huxley as suitable for comparison with Lu Hsün without examining, in each case, the historical condition from which certain characteristics of style, form, genre, and aesthetic assumptions emerged, without considering whether and in what exact manner they can be so compared.[13] Throughout his book, Hsia cites other names from Western literature as suitable comparisons for Chinese authors: for Yeh Shao-chün (Dr. Johnson's Rasselas and Chekhov — 59, 66); for Yü Ta-fu (Baudelaire and Joyce — 108–9); for Lao She (Joyce and Fielding — 173, 180); for Shen Tsung-wen (Yeats, Wordsworth, and Faulkner — 190, 202, 203, 204); and for Eileen
Chang (Mansfield, Porter, Welty, McCullers, and Austen — 389, 392). Here are some typical one-sentence comparisons: "The story [Lu Hsün's "K'ung I-ch'i"] has an economy and restraint characteristic of some of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories" (34); "the slow movement, the stylized language [of Yeh Shao-chün] and the pervasive cast of melancholy remind one . . . of Johnson's Rasselas " (59); "[In Lao She's Two Mas ], the elder Ma is also something of a Leopold Bloom . . . his son is the counterpart of Stephan Dedalus" (173). Indeed, we are asked to read these Chinese writers, whose historical concerns and personal obsessions are obviously different from those of their Western counterparts, through the filtering lens of the entire Western tradition. Anybody familiar with the historical development of these Chinese writers will find that the convergence of aesthetic elements in Chinese and Western writers, when they occur in a given work, came about and exist in a much more complex way than given in these passing hints and remarks.
Behind Hsia's approach is another assumption, endorsed by many scholars of modern Chinese literature, namely that, since a certain given work has imitated a transplanted model, we can proceed to examine the native Chinese product from the cultural assumptions of the Western model as if what is true of the source model must also be true of its derivative product. The fact is that there has never been such a thing as total acceptance of an alien model, in spite of the enthusiastic rhetoric with which modern intellectuals spelled out their advocacy of complete Westernization. In the consciousnesses of these advocates there were always native elements that conditioned the process of transplantation. We must ask these questions: what were the historical and social changes that prompted the rejection of the traditional past and the acceptance of a certain alien ideology? In the course of the acceptance, what native ideological aesthetic models were resorted to (albeit unconsciously) for support or justification? What kind of modification was being made to localize an alien model so that native acceptance could be gained? What intellectual or aesthetic obsessions in the native world view, including theory of history and mental habits, conditioned the rejection of certain dimensions of an imported theory? We should also observe that the notion of a consistent literary model in Western literature is itself questionable; the so-called "Western model" employed by these poets and critics is itself a distortion of Western literature.
Take the example of Romanticism so feverishly embraced by Chinese writers of the 1920s and 1930s. These writers highlighted
only the emotional side of Romanticism (often in the extreme form of sentimentalism) and hardly understood the activities of imagination so central to the Romantics. Overwhelmed by the imposing stature of science recently deified, they did not understand that it was in reacting against the rising threat of science itself — especially as conceived in the seventeenth century, when it was believed that everything, including the mind, operates passively, according to certain physical laws — that the Romantics affirmed the importance of Imagination as an organizing agent, through which they embarked upon an agonized metaphysical quest into the noumenal. This aspect of the epistemological quest so central in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Goethe, Novalis, and others was hardly understood by the early Chinese "Romantics." Thus, it is appropriate to ask a question of this sort: To what extent had the choice of emotional Romanticism over epistemological Romanticism been conditioned by a native brand of emotionalism, such as the emphasis upon the impulsive as found in certain neo-Taoists of the third and fourth centuries (the Recluses of the Bamboo Groves, etc.) and in the poetic celebration of this emphasis as in the work of Li Po? To what extent had the more central concern of seeing nature as it is, self-complete, promoted by the philosophical Taoists, induced the Chinese writers to refrain from participating in the self-made agony of the metaphysical search?
Similarly, the Chinese symbolists were more attuned to the interplay of color, light, and sound in the nuances of Verlaine's Art poetique than to the metaphysical complexities of Mallarmé. They knew very little about Mallarmé's "flower" that is not to be found in the plant world but arises musically from words divine, absolute, privileged, and self-referential, nor did they understand the sophistication of his reversed Platonic scheme. For example, one may ask: What kind of aesthetic parallel did Liang Tsung-tai abstract from Baudelaire's "Correspondances," inducing him to speak of Basho's[*] frog haiku and Lin P'u's couplet as prime examples of symbolist poetry, in spite of their obviously divergent philosophical and aesthetic assumptions?[14] One may continue to ask what native philosophical and aesthetic obsessions conditioned the Chinese Marxists to denounce the Hegelian system, so pivotal to Marxist philosophy, as merely idealistic?
The answers to these and many other questions require us to be simultaneously aware of the scope and operation of both cultural systems in the total scheme of things. The entire process of a cultural phenomenon's growth cannot be fully grasped by merely comparing
and contrasting two works from two cultures in abstraction from their relationship to the historical moments in question. The morphology of many of the ideological and aesthetic positions in modern China must be grounded in the total fabric of the economic, historic, sociological, and cultural complex. The historical factors leading to the rise of Romanticism in Europe were very different from those that prompted its sudden rise in China. For example, the side-by-side transplantation of science and Romanticism in China must be considered as having many ambiguous ramifications. European classicism, which occurred centuries before Romanticism, and realism, which occurred after, as well as many other transplanted ideologies and theories — all had their specific socio-historical origins, each occupying different spatial and temporal extensions and many of them being clearly mutually antagonistic. It is intriguing that all these ideologies and literary movements appeared in their transplanted forms almost simultaneously (sometimes all merged in one writer) — in a matter of ten to twenty years. However, merely to point up the difference begs the question of how one can explain adequately this composite phenomenon (let us call it superstructure, to follow temporarily the Marxist argument) as a result of its economic base.
Thus, if we proceed only from the socio-cultural assumptions of Western models (Marxism being only one of them), what we get would be some abstract conceptions cut off from the total, historically determined complex of concrete reality. We must try to understand the "inner necessity" that led Chinese writers to accept (and accept simultaneously) all these ideologies. What kind of historical relevance did Chinese writers find in these ideologies? How much of this relevance was determined by historical events and how much by the subjective consciousness operating within the interweaving web of these events? I use the word "relevance" with no implication that the Chinese intellectuals had, at that historical juncture, any kind of root understanding of certain imported ideologies. They often did not. As a matter of fact, if they had understood fully the extreme form of egoistic individualism implied in Romanticism, if they had understood fully the racist and selfish attitude partially implied in Darwin's "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" (Spencer's term later adopted by Darwin) and understood that these views are at the root in opposition to the Chinese emphasis upon the Taoist "equality of things" and upon the Confucian "Great Unity," they would have rejected them immediately.
Therefore, we must understand the complex way in which an
ideology enters into the historical consciousness of the Chinese. The part of the ideology accepted by the intellectuals might not even be the essential part. Rather, it is the part that happens to be relevant to the historical-sociological changes at that particular juncture of time. Thus, we have to further distinguish this part from the transplanted model's cultural aspects that are conducive to the consolidation of the Chinese tradition in the process of innovation. To do this, we must first have a full grasp of the essential Chinese quality of the traditional cultural and aesthetic horizon and its source strength as it operated in the past. We must then investigate the Western ideology in question, including its source strength in its own spatio-temporal environment, before we can distinguish the possibilities and impossibilities of its convergence with and cross-fertilization of the Chinese tradition. Only then can we tell what exactly has been iconoclastically rejected in the process, what remains unaltered, and how this unaltered part has helped to mediate those elements from the West to effect a synthesis that would consolidate and enrich, but not substantively change, the native intellectual horizon.
Here, I must hasten to say that not all the intellectuals were clear about the choice they made. For example, those in the early phase of the May 4th Movement indiscriminately embraced Western ideas. It was not exactly blind worship. It was originally born out of a need for revenge, a need to strike back with the same weapons the aggressors used against the Chinese. The threat of total destruction by the Western powers and the consequent national humiliation drove them to this action. The intellectuals felt, as never before, that China had reached the end. There was no time to think through both systems to carefully work out a politico-socio-cultural framework best suited to the indigenous temperament. Caught up in revolutionary zeal, what they saw was the potential of salvation that these Western ideologies, collectively, seemed to promise, as if all of them, at root, were Promethean and Faustean, capable of instantly saving and transforming a China in crisis. These interpretations dominated their process of appropriation. The minds of almost all the intellectuals were colored by such an explosive emotionalism that the May 4th Movement can hardly be called a Chinese Renaissance. As one Chinese historian aptly observed, the intellectuals did nothing to revive traditional Chinese culture or to establish knowledgeably the Western tradition. What they did was to reenact more than two hundred years of Western cultural changes in a matter of ten to twenty years.[15] Hence, rather than judging the intellectuals abstractly
against either a Chinese or Western mode of thinking, we must understand their perception of culture and history and their appropriation of foreign culture as a function of their anxiety and of their attempt to come to grips with the chaos of their own times as they searched for some possibility of totality. Thus, their works should not be viewed from a strict aesthetic perspective, cut off from concrete history. They must be projected into the arena where life-process and art-process, being one and inseparable, became the final composition of true meaning.
Let us dwell here, for a moment, on the process of cultural appropriation , which holds a sort of pivotal position in all these changes. Cultural appropriation can be seen either in an individual act by an artist, as, for example, in Lu Hsün's use of Gogol in his "A Madman's Diary," or in a larger cultural whole, as, for example, the appropriation of democracy and science or what has been characterized as the spirit of Enlightenment in the Chinese cultural milieu. Like Eliot's eclectic vision of tradition discussed in the first part of this essay, each appropriation must be worked into some traditional scheme so as to take root. An instructive parallel can be found in the neo-Confucianists' appropriations from Taoism and Buddhism. In order to rival the metaphysical and transcendent dimensions of Buddhism, a popular and powerful religion, the early neo-Confucianists turned to the I Ching and came up with the idea of T'ai Chi (
Moving from appropriation to synthesis, neo-Confucianism not only overturned the dominant Buddhism but also emerged as a new, leading source of intellectual power for centuries to come. But the process of appropriation and synthesis in modern China has been more complicated and, as time has now shown, more difficult. The confrontation and negotiation between Chinese and Western cultural models has been going on for almost seven decades, and there still exists the impression of misfits and mismatches — of what the
Chinese call sui-t'u pu-fu (
The so-called denunciation of tradition was often a surface gesture. The education of all these intellectuals, Hu Shih, Lu Hsün, Kuo Mojo, Hsü Chih-mo, Wen I-to, and others was in the Chinese classics. Therefore, when they expressed themselves in creative works or meditated on societal forms, the traditional aesthetic sense and cultural ideals submerged below their consciousness would still, like a ghost behind the arras, affect their choices. Take, for example, the early Kuo Mo-jo, whose poetry is often characterized by an explosive celebration of the self in a bombardment of apostrophes that proclaimed him an all-out iconoclast. And yet, as he endorsed Western concepts of freedom, unconsciously he would usher in the Taoist concept as the Chinese counterpart. When he celebrated revolution, he would resort to the myth of Kung-Kung as an unstated justification for his acceptance of the Western source of inspiration. Even more interesting is "Nirvana of the Phoenix," a poem on the rejuvenation of China from dead ashes. The poem is prefaced by both the Western and the Chinese myths of the phoenix; then there is a middle section, which is almost a direct paraphrase of Ch'ü Yüan's "T'ien Wen" (
turn, is an emergence song or song of the creation myth. Here, as in many similar examples in Hsü Chih-mo, Wen I-to, Lu Hsün, and others, there is an unconscious attempt to give the appropriation of a foreign cultural motif a traditional footing, so to speak, even though, as we will see, these links may be only contingently relevant. From our point of view, Chuang-tzu's "depending on nothing" (
Is there a way to modernize China without substantively changing her intellectual horizon? To this question, I have no satisfactory answers. It is clear, however, that many of the assumptions in the transplanted models go against the Chinese grain. The close examination of this fact would move well beyond the scope of this essay. But let me offer at least one perspective in the hope that it will stimulate thought in this much-contested area of debate.
The May 4th Movement has been called by the Chinese critic Li Ch'ang-chih a Chinese Enlightenment characterized by a primacy of rational thinking, skepticism, the critical spirit, verifiable scientific truth, mathematical precision, and pragmatic instrumentalism.[16] These were indeed new dimensions to the Chinese intellectual horizon of the early twentieth century. They spurred intellectuals to back away from traditional dogmas and seek out new vistas. In this sense, we must consider them a real contribution to historical change. And yet, these same elements have now taken on the dimension of myths and have disturbed the native sensibility the most, creating a constant feeling of alienation and separation. What is most intriguing is the fact that these same elements, which have played a key role in the West (in spite of periods of resistance to them), have recently been put in question. One such view may be an important oblique footnote to the yet-to-be-articulated phenomenon in China. Max Horkheimer, in a series of books — The Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Theodor W. Adorno), Eclipse of Reason , and Critique of Instrumental Reason — takes Western rational humankind to task for manipulating, dominating, and consequently alienating natural world, turning
it into a mere object.[17] The process has not only alienated nature but made humankind into an object as well:
The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world. . . . What man wants to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. . . . For the Enlightenment, whatever does not conform to the rule of computation and utility is suspect. . . . Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. . . . Thinking objectifies itself to become an automatic, self-activating process; an impersonation of the machine that it produces itself so that ultimately the machine can replace it. . . . Mathematical procedure became, so to speak, the ritual of thinking. . . . It turns thought into a thing, an instrument. . . . World domination over nature turns against the thinking subject himself. . . . Subject and object are both rendered ineffectual.[18]
The principle of domination has become the idol to which everything is sacrificed. The history of man's efforts to subjugate nature is also the history of man's subjugation by man. . . . As the principle of the self endeavoring to win in the fight against nature in general, against other people in particular, and against its own impulses, the ego is felt to be related to the functions of domination, command, and organization. Mathematics, crystal-clear, imperturbable, and self-sufficient, the classical instrument of formalized reason, best exemplifies the working of this austere agency. . . . The ego dominates nature.[19]
In the process of appropriation from the West, to what degree were the Chinese intellectuals aware of the consequences of this development, which clearly goes against the much-cherished Chinese position that sees human beings as cooperative partners of nature, not exploiters? Both the Taoist and Confucian philosophies urge humans to model themselves after nature. As human beings are members of the cooperative design of the total composition of things, they must also be cooperative members of a community, a community that emphasizes giving rather than taking and in which the tacit understanding is to forgo the primacy of the ego in order to complete a larger unity in society and with nature. In this united community human beings can function to their maximum without distorting the
original potentials of others. In such a cooperative framework, to which most traditional Chinese intellectuals commit themselves, the principle of domination and manipulation is out of place. Is it the threat of the dehumanizing and denaturizing effects of the Western ideologies upon this Chinese temperament that has occasioned the almost ceaseless series of antagonistic literary debates from the May 4th Movement to the present? How has this clash between two cultural positions informed us about the debates between the iconoclasts and the traditionalists, between the Creationists and the Society of Literary Studies, between the Creation-Sun Societies and the Crescent poets over revolutionary literature as well as those various debates over the issues of nationalism, proletariat literature, popularization, national form, and so forth?
The answer to this is not simple. The attitudes behind the Chinese intellectuals' appropriation of Western ideas and their negotiation between models are at best ambivalent. We must remember that it was initially to combat foreign domination that they turned away from tradition, but they in actuality embraced a world view the implied practice of which would eventually bring them under another form of domination. Even more intriguing is the fact that it was not only foreign domination they were up against; they were also trying to free themselves from a native form of domination, namely, despotic autocratic rule that derived, paradoxically, from the same ideology that supposedly condemns such despotism. The ideal state of the Confucianists asks that each member of society fulfill his or her natural endowment by functioning according to a series of norms based upon a thorough understanding of the nature of things as they are (tao, hsing, li ). Ideally, the ruler should obtain this natural measure by investigating the original states of things, making himself sincere at heart, rectifying his character accordingly, and thus regulating, always in step with the natural measure of things, his family and his state. But in the actual process of governing, the ruler would proclaim himself to be following the "mandate of Heaven" and would establish and centralize his absolute rule with the aid of a landlord-gentry class that would manipulate and exploit the peasant masses.
Thus, we find that the total fabric of the modern Chinese intellectuals' negotiation between native and alien cultural models is rife with ambivalence. Almost all the Chinese intellectuals vacillated between the promise of democratization and the threat of the commodification of humanity in the transplanted models, between the rejection and affirmation of the native ideology. Liang Ch'i-ch'ao is a
case in point. Liang, whose "The Renovation of the People" of 1902 paved the way for the later intellectuals' acclamation of Western democracy and whose journal Hsin-min t'ung-pao (A Miscellaneous Journal for New People ) has been considered the semantic source for many of the new democratic (hsin-min-chu ) claims of later decades, was also one of the first to impugn Western culture. In his "Impressions of Europe," he abhors Europe's overreliance on science and material culture, a dependency that he believes would lead to the destruction of Chinese cultural traits. Indeed, he considers the scientific inventions of the West to be based upon greed, manipulation, and warfare.
Any study of this period must begin with a recognition of the complex ambivalence in the processes of appropriation and negotiation between Chinese and Western cultural models. To fully understand the interpenetration of the planes and surfaces of past and present and native and alien cultures that have been in a constant double state of attraction and repulsion, we must possess a clear awareness of historical totality, an awareness that will require us to step out of single, monocultural perspectives to witness the simultaneous sequences of dynamic growth and change of cultural traits in the torrential flow of concrete history.