The Limits of Realism "d0e968"

Realism and the Promise of Cultural Transformation

"Sincere, progressive, activist, free, egalitarian, creative, beautiful, good, peaceful, cooperative, industrious, prosperous for all"—with this cumbersome list of adjectives the young intellectual Chen Duxiu

described the new society he and others involved in the May Fourth movement hoped to create. A contrasting set of terms described the old society that was to be replaced: traditional China was "hypocritical, conservative, passive, constrained, classicist, imitative, ugly, evil, belligerent, disorderly, lazy, and prosperous only for the few."^[1] The heterogeneity of these lists attests not simply to Chen's bent for rhetorical excess but to the comprehensive nature of the changes he envisioned and to a certain confusion of priorities. With his jumbled adjectives, Chen sketched the fault lines of the coming revolution; along with objective social changes, the moral complexion of the Chinese people was to be transformed.

Literature was to play an important role in this transformation, as Chen made clear in another article, where he imagined an "army of the literary revolution" advancing with banners unfurled. On these banners he saw imprinted the literary equivalents of the above lists: "Down with the ornate, obsequious literature of the aristocrats; up with the plain, expressive literature of the people! Down with the stale, ostentatious literature of the classics; up with the fresh, sincere literature of realism! Down with the pedantic, obscure literature of the

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recluse; up with the clear, popular literature of society!"^[2] In his call for a people's, or national, literature (guomin wenxue

a realist literature (xieshi wenxue
and a social literature

Chen was employing words that resonated with meaning for the young revolutionaries of the time, words that were the building blocks of a new national identity. Guomin connoted the recent adjustment in the Chinese world order whereby the once-supreme Middle Kingdom was redefined as a nation-state among others; xieshi marked a break with the superstition and entrenched classicism of traditional intellectual life; shehui signified the displacement of Confucian bureaucratic and familial relations that, it was hoped, would make possible the birth of a modern, democratic society. These words have been used so insistently to describe the Chinese experience in the decades since Chen wrote that they have grown stale, but one senses from context how fresh and potent they must have seemed to the young Chen Duxiu.

Chen was not the first Chinese intellectual to use the term xieshi (or the synonymous

in his prescription for a new literature. The word was in fact a Japanese invention, one of many neologisms created by Meiji intellectuals as they translated works of Western literature and philosophy into Japanese. The compound was then adopted by Chinese students, for many of whom Japanese textbooks and translations provided their first exposure to Western ideas. The reformer Liang Qichao

who fled to Japan after the failure of the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, was one such student of the West, and his writings contain the first significant Chinese use of the term xieshi . In his 1902 essay "On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People," Liang adopted a distinction, originally made by the Japanese critic Tsubouchi Shoyo^[*]

between works belonging to the idealistic school of fiction

which draw readers out of the present environment into a better world of the imagination, and those of the realistic school

which reveal to readers facets of the present world generally suppressed or ignored.^[3] As we shall see, this distinction was to characterize

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much of the discussion about fiction in the years to follow, though more often than not the term romanticist

was to replace idealistic .

Liang's essay was seminal not only for its introduction of these terms but for its forceful advocacy of literary reform. Like Yan Fu

another major figure of the late Qing reform movement, Liang had been struck by the esteem accorded to fiction in the West; in Yan Fu's words, Western countries had "time and again benefited from the assistance of fiction" as they became "enlightened or civilized."^[4] Whereas fiction had traditionally been viewed in China as an immoral, or at best frivolous, pastime, the nineteenth-century Western example showed that it could serve as a powerful tool for social persuasion. Particularly after the failure of the 1898 reforms, many progressive intellectuals came to believe that a revolution in popular opinion, a cultural transformation, was necessary before political innovations could be attempted in China; both Yan Fu and Liang Qichao saw fiction as a promising instrument for such change. In his 1902 essay Liang went so far as to suggest that the reform of fiction was the primary task then facing the intellectuals: "If you want to revitalize a country's populace, you must first revitalize that country's fiction."^[5] Serious fiction such as that popular in the West had the power to awaken commoners' aspirations for a better life and so served the high moral purpose of encouraging them to work for their own and for society's betterment. Liang's ideas were quickly taken up by other reform-minded intellectuals. Wang Zhongqi

for example, wrote: "What our people lack most is public spirit; only fiction can instill patriotic, communal, and caring feelings in people who completely lack such a spirit."^[6] Di Chuqing

reiterated Liang's estimation of fiction as the Mahayana, or great vehicle, of literature, calling it an "X-ray of society" with an extraordinary power to "guide humanity."^[7]

[5] Liang Qichao, "Xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi," p. 157.

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What was original about these arguments was not their apparently exaggerated claims for the power of literature to transform society. The Chinese had always viewed their written heritage, in particular their long philosophical and poetic traditions, as the primary embodiment of their culture, and would-be reformers had frequently ascribed social disintegration to a poor choice of literary models. But in searching for new literary forms to substitute for the offending ones, reformers had traditionally looked to well-established native models and represented their own innovations as the reinstitution of classical manners and customs. Liang and the other late Qing reformers broke this mold by promoting a vernacular rather than classical model and, even more radically, by looking abroad for prototypes. In fact late Qing and early May Fourth thinkers had only a very rough knowledge of Western fiction (Chen Duxiu's list of model writers included such diverse figures as Wilde, Hugo, and Dickens),^[8] but they were impressed by how broad an influence fiction exerted over society and by the dynamism they associated generally with Western cultural products.

This dynamism, which was to become one of Chen Duxiu's major themes, had first been observed and analyzed by Yan Fu in his essays of the mid-1890s. While introducing Spencer and Darwin to Chinese readers, Yan Fu had written that whereas the West was forward-looking and welcomed change, China "loves the ancient and despises the new."^[9] In 1915, when Chen Duxiu began editing the journal Xin qingnian

(New youth), which was to become the primary forum for discussion of the new literature, he must have thought that history had once again demonstrated the truth of Yan Fu's remarks: the 1911 revolution, though it brought an end to imperial rule, had clearly failed to solve China's underlying social and cultural problems. Once again China had proven resistant to change, and reformers of Chen's generation were stricken with a despondency even more crushing than the one their predecessors had suffered after the failure of the 1898 reform effort. Chen resolved to counter his generation's disheartenment with a passionate drive to instill in Chinese society the

[8] Chen Duxiu, "Wenxue geming lun," p. 140.

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"power to resist," to move and change.^[10] Always given to thinking in dichotomies, Chen Duxiu played heavily on the contrast between East and West in his May Fourth essays, praising the West for its "history of liberation" while lamenting Chinese "ignorance of the function [of revolution] in the improvement of civilization."^[11] Chinese timidity was evident not only in political matters but in cultural ones as well, and Chen went on to apply Darwinian notions of evolutionary change to literature. He accepted Liang's division of literature into two schools, the realistic and the idealistic or romanticist, but whereas Liang had found value in both schools, Chen did not give them equal standing. Borrowing freely from contemporary Western accounts of literary history, which portrayed Western literature—and by hegemonic extension, world literature—as having passed from classicism to romanticism to realism in ever-ascending linear progress, he argued the evolutionary superiority of realism.^[12] Though classicism and romanticism remained predominant in China, he wrote, it was inevitable that in the future Chinese literature "would move in the direction of realism."^[13] As the culmination of a long evolutionary process, realism was for Chen the literary embodiment of the scientific and democratic spirit that he believed characterized the contemporary West. His advocacy of the mode was thus a natural extension of his campaign to rid China of traditional cultural constraints and thereby make way for a general social revolution.

Hu Shi

an equally influential if somewhat more moderate advocate of reform, joined Chen Duxiu in instructing writers to pay more attention to "meaning and reality" in their works than to matters of style.^[14] In an important essay on Ibsen published in 1918,

[13] Chen Duxiu, letter to the editor, Xin qingnian 1, no. 4 (15 December 1915): 2.

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Hu Shi went further, examining the actual operation of realism (or what he called Ibsenism) in far more detail than Chen Duxiu had done. Like other progressive intellectuals of the period, Hu was impressed with the influence that literary works such as Ibsen's plays appeared to exert in Western society. In Hu Shi's view this influence resulted above all from Ibsen's refusal to cater to the greatest human weakness, people's inherent reluctance to confront the truth about themselves and their society. Ibsen defies this natural predilection for escapism and bravely discloses the truth; in particular he forces his readers to observe the many ways in which society and the family work to stifle individual conscience. Yet Hu is careful to insist that though Ibsen's work is critical in spirit, it is never purely negative in effect:

Ibsen described actual social and familial conditions in order to move readers, to make us feel how dark and corrupt our families and society are and to make us understand that our families and society must be reformed—this is what is meant by Ibsenism. On the surface, it seems destructive, but in fact it is entirely healthy. . . . Ibsen knows that society's diseases are many and complex and that there is no panacea, so he can only take a blood test, describe the illness, and let each patient seek out his or her own medicine.^[15]

Astutely, Hu recognizes that in Ibsen's world the positive effect of realistic description is achieved by polarizing the individual and the social order; progress comes only through the lonely struggles of a few extraordinary people against society. Again Hu applies the disease metaphor, suggesting such individuals play a vital role in society's survival: "The health of the society and the nation depends on a few tenacious, unrelenting white blood cells who battle the wicked and depraved elements of society; only through them is there hope of reform and progress."^[16] In recognizing that for Ibsen heroism consists of the courage "forthrightly to attack social corruption," Hu Shi evokes, without explicitly naming it, another important theme of the May Fourth enlightenment, that is, the pursuit of zijue

"autonomy" or "self-consciousness."^[17] May Fourth thinkers used this term

[16] Ibid., p. 192.

[17] Chen Duxiu first argued the importance of autonomy in 1915. See the discussion in Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment , p. 38.

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to denote the state of intellectual and spiritual independence that they wanted to see replace the "slavish" mentality inculcated in the Chinese people by Confucianism. Like Chen's notion of perpetual revolution, zijue was associated positively with the West: only freethinkers, liberated from the strictures of tradition, could produce the kind of cultural criticism that another frequent contributor to New Youth , Luo Jialun

called "the creative force in Western civilization."^[18]

Mao Dun

the critic and author most responsible for the propagation of a Western-style realism in China, built largely on the work of these late Qing and early Republican reformers when he began to systematically introduce the theory and history of the mode in the early 1920s. His early criticism makes clear that he fully accepted Chen Duxiu's notion of literary evolution, as well as his equation of realism with science and democracy. Indeed, in an article Mao Dun published in January 1920, entitled "What Is the Duty of Contemporary Men of Letters?" he employed the same terms that Chen had used to describe his ambitions for the new literature: he called on writers and critics to "imbue the literary world with the spirit of democracy, to make literature social, to tear down the mask of aristocratic literature and give free reign to the spirit of popular literature."^[19] Realism appealed to Mao Dun because of its emphasis on what he called objective observation

and because of its unflinching examination of all aspects of society, the lower depths as well as the upper strata, the ugly as well as the beautiful. In an article published in Xiaoshuo yuebao

(Short story magazine), a house journal of the Shanghai Commercial Press where he worked, Mao Dun went so far as to lay out a plan for the introduction of realism, providing two lists of writers whose works merited study and translation. These lists were dominated by Scandinavian and Russian names (Strindberg, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoyevski, Gorky) but also included Zola, Maupassant, Shaw, and Wells.^[20]

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In December 1920 Mao Dun was given a chance to execute his plan: in that month the Wenxue yanjiu hui

(Association for literary studies) was formed in Beijing, and Mao Dun was entrusted with editorship of its quasi-official publication, the newly revamped Short Story Magazine . Although the association was probably conceived by Zheng Zhenduo

Mao Dun was one of its twelve founding members and a driving force in its operations. In its charter the new organization called for art "for life's sake"

and specified three goals: the introduction and study of world literature, the reassessment of traditional Chinese literature, and the creation of a new literature. As its members frequently pointed out in later years, the prescription did not amount to advocacy of any particular literary doctrine, but the foreign writers who were most prominently featured in the early issues of the revised Short Story Magazine (and whose works were included in the association's series of translations, the Wenxue yanjiu hui congshu
) were primarily those on Mao Dun's earlier lists, and the association inevitably became linked with realism in the mind of the literate public.

For those who first advocated its adoption in China realism was thus associated with a whole complex of Western ideas and attitudes, especially with notions of cultural dynamism and intellectual autonomy. Nevertheless, a careful reading of the relevant essays by Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, and Mao Dun reveals certain reservations, or at least hesitations, about the mode, reservations that become significant when viewed in the light of later Chinese reevaluations of the Western influence. Hu Shi, for his part, while expressing admiration for Ibsen's spirit of struggle, appears somewhat reluctant to prescribe his individualistic anarchism for China: "Societies and nations evolve with time, so one cannot definitively point to a certain medicine as a cure-all. . . . Moreover, each society and nation is different: the medicine that's good for Japan may not be appropriate for China."^[21] Indeed, Hu Shi was later to actively campaign against individualism,^[22] and the ambivalence he displays even in his essay on Ibsenism was characteristic of Chinese discussions of the subject: as Benjamin Schwartz has

[21] Hu Shi, "Yibushengzhuyi," in Zhongguo xin wenxue daxi 1:191.

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observed, when Yan Fu introduced the writings of John Stuart Mill in the 1890s, he construed Mill's individualism not as an end in itself but rather as "a means to the advancement of 'the people's virtue and intellect,' and beyond this to the purposes of the state."^[23] For Hu Shi, Ibsen's egoism is likewise defensible not for its intrinsic value but for its positive effect on society. Even with his blood metaphors, Hu Shi wavers in assigning a place to the individual who dares to form an independent judgment on society: where in the first passage cited the social rebel is seen as outside the body, drawing blood for the purposes of an objective diagnosis, by the conclusion of the essay Hu Shi has found a new place for the rebel within the body, as a white blood cell fighting for the survival not of the self but of the larger organism.

Similarly, Chen Duxiu and Mao Dun were forced to modify their professed faith in the natural evolution of literary forms as they learned more about current Western trends. In his "Discussion of the History of Modern European Literature," Chen conceded that realism had given way to naturalism in the West, but in a letter to the editor written shortly thereafter, he recommended that Chinese writers continue to take realism as their model because the explicit portrayal of violence and social disorder in naturalism would not be accepted by Chinese readers.^[24] Mao Dun, writing somewhat later and with a better knowledge of the current literary scene in the West, recognized that varieties of neoromanticism (a term that embraced for him such diverse movements as expressionism, futurism, and symbolism) had

[23] Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power , p. 141. Cf. Chow Tsetsung, The May Fourth Movement , p. 360:

To many young Chinese reformers, emancipation of the individual was as much for the sake of saving the nation as upholding individual rights. The value of individual and independent judgment was indeed appreciated more in the May Fourth period than ever before, yet the individual's duty to society and the nation was also emphasized.

Also cf. Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness , pp. 67–68:

The stress placed on the importance of the individual by Ch'en Tu-hsiu [Chen Duxiu] and by iconoclastic intellectuals in general at this time cannot, from our historical perspective, be identified with the Western concept of individual liberty based on an ethical conviction of the worth of the individual, which evolved mainly through a secularization of religious faith, but rather represented an aspect of the revolt on the part of these intellectuals against the traditional suppression of the individual in Chinese societies. . . . When the high tide of iconoclasm ebbed, the May Fourth individualism waned.

[24] Chen Duxiu, letter to the editor, Xin qingnian , p. 2.

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supplanted realism; indeed, for a short time in mid-1920 Mao Dun lost his faith in both science and realism and wrote glowingly of the "revolutionary, liberating, and creative spirit" of romanticism.^[25] By the time of the association's founding later that year, however, he had come to the conclusion that realism, if no longer at the cutting edge of international literary developments, was nevertheless "good for China at this time in its history."^[26] Realism met certain local and, he suspected, temporary needs; in particular, he hoped the practice of realism would encourage writers to systematically examine the broader currents of social history and not use their fiction simply to vent private complaints.

Throughout the period, then, specific Western concepts were initially embraced because of their potential contribution to China's cultural rejuvenation, but they were later subjected to reinterpretation when they appeared not to be entirely suited to this larger goal. These second thoughts suggest that May Fourth thinkers did not entertain Western concepts out of a disembodied intellectual conviction; they saw them as pieces of a developing solution to one overriding question: from what source could China find the strength to free itself from the shackles of tradition and establish a new cultural order? This was above all a question of origins and of will, and in their effort to forge a literary response to it, May Fourth writers turned to Western literature. In doing so, however, they were not looking simply to replace the authority of their own tradition with that of a foreign one; nor were they looking for formal patterns to copy. Most May Fourth critics at one time or other warned against the dangers of imitating other works, whether Western or Chinese. Western literature served Chinese intellectuals primarily as a lever with which they could pry themselves free of their own tradition. It was admired not so much for its specific formal qualities but because in the West individual works, especially works of fiction, appeared to emerge from the fresh and original observations of individuals responding directly to

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the stimuli of contemporary social phenomena. May Fourth writers hoped to incorporate into their works a similar authority or essence from outside the traditional province of literature.

The same logic that conditioned the acceptance of such Western ideas as individualism and evolutionism applies to the history of realism and its advocacy in China. Realism was not primarily endorsed by Chinese thinkers for what Westerners associate most closely with it, its mimetic pretense, that is, the simple desire to capture the real world in language. At least in the early years of the New Literature movement, Chinese writers rarely discussed problems of verisimilitude—how the text works to establish an equivalency between itself and the extraliterary world—and little critical attention was given to the technical problems of fictional representation, a preoccupation of such Western realists as Flaubert and James. Instead realism was embraced because it seemed to meet Chinese needs in the urgent present undertaking of cultural transformation by offering a new model of creative generativity and literary reception. Though the thread of both these concerns runs throughout the period under discussion, questions of literary origins generally dominated critical polemics in the 1920s, whereas the issue of literary reception became foremost in the 1930s. In the rest of this chapter, I will take up each of these matters in turn, examining them in the context of the decade in which they received the most discussion.