IN DECEMBER 1951, SHEN CONGWEN joined a mission to observe the outcome of Land Reform in Sichuan Province. On the road, Shen wrote a series of letters to his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, and two sons. One dated January 25, 1952, is of particular interest. Shen writes that he was left alone to guard an old house that night; he could not sleep due to the noise of neighbors coughing and quarreling. To pass the time, he turned to an abridged edition of the Shiji 史記 (The record of the historian) that he had found in the trash a few days earlier. As he thumbed through the Liezhuan 列傳 (Biographies) section, he “seemed to enter the ambiance of two thousand years ago: the lived circumstances of the author and the feeling with which he wrote the biographies.”1 Shen contemplates how loneliness could help one generate new ideas:
When analyzed in terms of its figures’ experiences, one strain of Chinese history—that which pertains to the development of feelings—is inextricable from loneliness. The abstract inclination of Oriental thought cannot be separated from feeling either. Therefore, the discourse of “feeling” (youqing 有情) and the discourse of “actions” (shigong 事功)2 are sometimes united into one, but more often than not, they are opposed to each other, forming a state of contradiction. If one harbors “feeling” throughout life, one may end up violating the societal demand of “actions.” … Whereas Guan Zhong 管仲 and Yan Ying 晏嬰 are seen as paragons of “actions,” Qu Yuan and Jia Yi 賈誼 are seen as cases of “feeling.” It follows that “feeling” often implies “incompetence” and, by corollary, “ignorance.”3
Nevertheless, Shen continues, “‘actions’ is something one can always learn and emulate, but ‘feeling’ remains unfathomable.”4
For Shen Congwen, Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145?–86 B.C.), the author of The Record of the Historian, is a great historian not only because he chronicles dynastic vicissitudes and heroic deeds with professional rigor but also because he entertains an extraordinary vision of what history is and should be. This enables Sima Qian to probe individual lives at their most compelling while never losing sight of the overarching magnitude of the time and environment with which the individuals interact. Shen contends that this vision “has to do with that which the author has learned from his own life in totality”:
[Sima Qian’s] life was rich and mature. This richness and maturity did not come from his learning any more than from his own experience of pathos and pain. The Nianbiao 年表 (Annals) of the Records of the Historian deals with accomplishments, a section that was completed through archival research. The Biographies, however, required something special of the author’s life. To put it in a less sophisticated way, it could be accomplished only through feeling, feeling that came into existence as a result of the sedimentation of pain. This feeling is a deep perception of life, love of the most profound kind, and knowledge and understanding that go through and beyond actions.5
From the key words—“loneliness,” “pain,” “pathos,” and above all, “qing/feeling”—one can imagine how reactionary Shen must have sounded even to the letter’s addressees, his family members. China was celebrating the beginning of a new epoch, but Shen withdrew into ancient times, pondering the meaning of history and feeling. The 1951–52 trip was meant to have him witness the success of the revolution, an accomplishment of shigong indeed, yet it led him to contemplate the poetics of pain and pathos.6
Shen makes Sima Qian the implied interlocutor of his letter. As he suggests, through reading select passages of the Records of the Historian, he enters a contact zone where disparate temporalities fold into each other at the incantation of qing. Likewise, Shen gestures toward the possibility that his own sounding could resonate at other moments of history. At stake here is Shen’s radical dialogue with the dominant discourse of the new regime. In contrast with the linear, progressive timeline of revolution, Shen opts for an alternative history, which he sees as a constellation of events, agents, art objects, and sentiments illuminating one another across time and space. Instead of chronicling man-made miracles and disasters, Shen’s history inquires into the intricate turbulences underlying individual lives. Where the socialist telos thrives, Shen calls on the archaeology of qing/feeling.
The most polemical point of Shen’s letter pertains to the representability of history in literary terms. Shen considers Sima Qian a great historian and writer, capable of “depicting a given historical figure in a few hundred words while already showing the spiritual communication between the author and the figure under treatment.”7 He finds in Sima Qian’s language the hinge where the represented and representation meet. Insofar as its intelligibility is premised on the succession between past and present, language is to Shen not a transparent vehicle but a palpable sign, a figure, resulting from the sensory data and evocative stimuli of a time. Thus, with the case of the Records of the Historian in mind, Shen concludes that a great history has to be a literary history in the first place, inscribed by language as well as feeling.8
Shen Congwen is not unaware of the shortcomings of his vision. When he describes violence and pain as both the motivations of and impediments to a historian like Sima Qian, he is already thinking of the limitations of writing a history with feeling, then and in his own time. As his letter intimates, it will be ironic if the new political regime vows to represent “the insulted and the wounded” yet adopts the conventional “victor’s historiography” it claims to have abolished—proving its legitimacy by subscribing to a discourse reminiscent of the bygone history of “actions.” Shen’s musing brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s notion that all histories are records of the victors overwriting the losers, and therefore amount to a repeated exercise of barbarism.9
Benjamin tried to overcome the tiring repetition of the “newness” of history by taking a messianic cum materialist leap into the state of “now.”10 Shen Congwen does not have such a religious or ideological grounding in his re-vision of history. Instead, he proposes to resort to the mnemonic art of lyrical incantation, a poetic endeavor to construe qing—the quintessence of humanity—by conceptual, figurative, and performative means. In this, he is resonating with the traditional Chinese poetics of remembering and re-membering the past, shishi or poetry as history.11 But Shen is always mindful of the uncertain fate of such a lyrical endeavor; ruination and oblivion are merely the most obvious risks. He even hints that qing manifests itself in history only by default. As described above, the copy of the Records of the Historian he read on the Sichuan trip was only found by chance in the trash. Moreover, that his historical contemplation could be rendered only in the form of a family letter that was not unearthed until the 1990s bespeaks the precarious terms of inscribing qing/feeling at his (or any) time.12
But this is only part of the story. Shen Congwen also points out in his letter that despite its vulnerability, feeling can demonstrate its tenacious nature over the course of time. Moreover, thanks to its evocative power through the artistic engagement in everyday life (such as clothes and fashions, discussed in chapter 2), any expression of feeling is as materially grounded as it is “abstract.” These paradoxes constitute what Shen believes history is all about: underlying every chronicle of events is a much deeper and more mercurial kind of history—a history with feeling. It serves to circumscribe—and mediate—the immense domain of human experience beyond the tangible. For Shen, the most powerful testimonial to such a history with feeling is literature.
I discuss Shen’s letter at length because it is not an isolated case. If the history of twentieth-century China is permeated with revolutions and enlightenments, then it is equally underlain by a wide spectrum of feelings, from aspiration to wrath, bewilderment to resolution, loneliness to solidarity. How to tease out the lineage of “feeling” from the accounts of “actions” is a task, as Shen points out, that the Chinese moderns have yet to undertake. In the context of this book, the clash and coalescence between the lyrical and the epic in literary and other artistic forms serves as one starting point. With this understanding, I turn to an archaeological survey of the lyrical articulations from the turn of the modern century to the mid-century era, which will serve as the context for the case studies that constitute the following chapters.
The first section describes the genesis of modern Chinese lyrical or shuqing discourse, particularly its conflation with and development beyond the discourse of romanticism and revolutionism; the second section discusses the contested soundings of lyricism in the 1930s and 1940s; and the third section looks into the polemics of poetic agency when a heated debate over “exiling lyricism” versus “lyricizing China” arose during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The chapter ends with a reflective note on the rise of “political lyricism” in New China.
The Lyrical, the Romantic, the Revolutionary
Chinese moderns’ deliberation on the nature, exercise, and consequence of qing/feeling dates back to the late Qing era. Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921) and Xia Zengyou 夏曾佑 (1863–1924) proposed as early as 1898 the dialectic of heroic feeling (yingxiong zhiqing 英雄之情) versus romantic feeling (ernü zhiqing 兒女之情) as the fundamental appeal of popular fiction and drama. Although their proposal sounds conventional, their goal was to fashion the ideal Chinese subjectivity.13 The new century saw a succession of studies of qing/feeling from different angles. Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) advocated a “poetry revolution” (shijie geming 詩界革命) in 1899, thus inaugurating the modern politics of literature. In 1902, Liang famously argued in the preface to his fiction magazine, Xinxiaoshuo 新小説 (New fiction), that fiction bears an incredible power to move people because it is a repository of emotions. For Liang, xun 熏 (to diffuse), jin 浸 (to permeate), ci 刺 (to pierce), and ti 提 (to elevate) are the four major emotive functions of writing and reading fiction.14 Liang’s own style was so compelling as to win acclaim from his contemporaries, for “the tip of his brush is charged with feeling.”15
Also in 1902, the popular fiction writer Wu Jianren 吳趼人 (1867–1910) published fifty-seven essays under the general title Wu Jianren ku 吳趼人哭 (Wu Jianren weeps), in which he cites multiple reasons for shedding tears about national and personal circumstances.16 As if reacting to Wu, Liu E 劉鶚 (1857–1909) contends in Lao Can youji 老殘遊記 (Travels of Lao Can, 1907) that weeping conveys human feeling at its most intense: “We of this age have our feeling stirred about ourselves and the world, about family and the nation, about society, about the various races and religions. The deeper the emotions, the more bitter the weeping.”17 Meanwhile, the renowned translator Lin Shu 林紓 (1852–1924) is said to have wept profusely in the course of translating La Dame aux camellias.18 Tears constituted but one emotional outlet. As I have argued elsewhere, from laughter to indignation, from cynicism to melancholia, excessive emotions are a conspicuous characteristic of late Qing literati in pursuit of modernity.19
It was at this time that shuqing/lyricism entered the discursive field. In 1907, Lu Xun wrote “Wenhua pianzhi lun” 文化偏至論 (On cultural aberrations), critiquing the mounting crisis of materialism and conformity in Western civilization. For Lu Xun, this cultural malaise could be remedied only by the school of “metaphysical thought, charged with a rebellious and destructive force and desire for rejuvenation.”20 Therefore, “he who is tempted by external attractions will take an inward turn, engaging metaphysical meditation, calling on self-reflection and lyrical feeling, doing away with materialistic limitations, and inhabiting the domain of the innate mind.”21 The same year saw Wang Guowei’s 王國維 (1877–1927) turn from philosophy to literature, in pursuit of a form to better express his “emotional power.”22 This coincided with his writing “Yingguo dashiren baiyilong xiaozhuan” 英國大詩人白衣龍小傳 (A short biography of the great British poet Byron). Wang calls Byron “a quintessential lyrical poet, namely, a subjective poet … who expresses in poetry what disturbs his heart.” But Byron is not a “weak poet,” because “his conflict with the world comes not merely from the tension between ideal and reality but from individual desire and social convention.” Wang concludes that “Byron’s feeling is romantic feeling … though its intensity is to be acknowledged.”23
Shuqing undergoes redefinition in each of these treatments. The impact of Continental idealist philosophy and romanticism on both is unmistakable. Whereas Wang Guowei describes Byron as a lyrical poet by referring to the Schopenhauerean dialectic of desire versus transcendence, Lu Xun says that the lyrical spirit derives inspiration from the power of will (yili 意力), in the vein of Stirner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.24 More noticeably, the two masters use their newly acquired Western imaginary of the lyrical to engage with their own literary heritage. In “Moluo shilishuo” 摩羅詩力說 (On the power of the Mara poet), published in 1908, Lu Xun describes his ideal type of poet as a “spiritual warrior” who is able to “disturb people’s minds” (yingrenxin zhe 攖人心者).25 He names Qu Yuan the Chinese paragon for “giving voice to what his forebears feared to say”; still, he considers that “many [of Qu Yuan’s poetic lines] were strains of rococo pathos, but defiance was never there and the power to stir posterity was weak.”26 By contrast, Byron, with his recalcitrant passion and heroic deeds, personifies for Lu Xun the true model of the Mara poet. Most significantly, Lu Xun challenges the conventional wisdom that poetry teaches one “not to stray” (siwuxie 思無邪) and argues that, if poetry is supposed to “express one’s free will,” “to force one not to stray [in composing poetry] is to curb one’s free will. How can there be a promise of liberty under whips and halters?”27
This radical reading of traditional poetics enables Lu Xun to retrieve a history of disturbing and disturbed feelings in China. The image of Qu Yuan looms throughout Lu Xun’s career, as best evinced by the epigraph of his fiction volume Panghuang 彷徨 (Wandering), a quote from the Songs of the South: “The road was so far and so distant was my journey, and I wanted to go up and down, seeking my heart’s desire.”28 In “Han wenxueshi gangyao” 漢文學史綱要 (Outline of the literary history of the Han dynasty), Lu Xun upholds Sima Xiangru’s 司馬相如 (179?–127? B.C.) and Sima Qian’s individual integrity when confronting imperial authorities.29 In “Weijin fengdu jiwenzhang yu yaojijiu zhiguanxi” 魏晉風度及文章與葯及酒之關係 (On the manners and literary expressions and their relationship to alcohol and drugs), he ventures to reassess the literati culture of medieval China, bringing to light a politics of style that mixes mannerism and self-reflection, nonchalance and melancholia.30
Also in 1908, Wang Guowei published Renjian cihua 人間詞話 (Remarks on song lyrics and the human condition). Having consummated his passion for Western philosophers, Wang seeks to resuscitate in his work both the format and argument of Chinese poetics, along the lines of Yan Yu 嚴羽 (?–?, thirteenth century), Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (1619–1692), and Wang Shizhen 王士禎 (1634–1711). As critics have noted, although Wang strives to recapitulate premodern Chinese poetics, his engagement with notions such as subjectivity and objectivity, idealism and realism indicates his eclecticism in adopting Western concepts.31 Wang invokes Nietzsche’s dictum “the best literature is that which is written in blood” as his criterion for evaluating song lyrics, concluding that Li Yu 李煜 (937–978) best meets his standard.32 Wang’s pursuit results in his own theory of a “mental vista” (jingjie 境界), a state of awakening that is prompted by, but not limited to, the experience of poetic composition. This “mental vista” is subjective and aesthetically evocative, but it also resonates with the “arch-lyrical occasion” in literature as in history.33 Although bearing a Buddhist connotation, “mental vista” registers Wang Guowei’s idiosyncratic reflection on history. Having witnessed a succession of political crises in the Qing, Wang was haunted by a pessimistic outlook on Chinese civilization, such that he took his song lyrics and poetics as not a confirmation of but a farewell to his cherished cultural legacy epitomized by lyricism.34
Between Lu Xun and Wang Guowei there arose a spectrum of voices on shuqing/lyricism, chief of which is Chen Duxiu’s 陳獨秀 (1879–1942) in “Wenxue geminglun” 文學革命論 (On literary revolution, 1917). Chen proposes “to overthrow artificial, toadying aristocratic literature, and construct unassuming, lyrical national literature; overthrow clichéd, pompous classical literature, and construct fresh, sincere realistic literature; overthrow circuitous, obscure hermetic literature, and construct clear, popular literature.”35 The “lyrical” is invoked here in association with terms such as “fresh,” “sincere,” “clear,” “realistic,” and “popular,” and is hence a desirable outcome of literary revolution. Chen’s association of lyrical provocation with revolution and national consciousness indicates his indebtedness to the political vein of Western Romanticism,36 but it also suggests a repackaging of time-honored shijiao 詩教 or poetry as an institution that facilitates aesthetic bearing, ethical cultivation, and political harmony.
In the wake of the May Fourth Movement, “lyricality” (shuqingxing 抒情性) quickly gained currency, and “lyrical poetry” (shuqingshi 抒情詩) became a popular term. Zhou Zuoren, Kang Baiqing 康白情 (1896–1959), Zhou Taixuan 周太玄 (1895–1968), and Liang Shiqiu 梁實秋 (1903–1987), among others, all stated at one point or another that “poetry is a literature oriented to feeling.”37 Bing Xin’s 冰心 (1900–1999) and Zong Baihua’s 宗白華 (1897–1986) exercise of “small poems” (xiaoshi 小詩); Wang Jingzhi 汪靜之 (1902–1996) and his fellow “Lakeshore Poets’” (hupan shiren 湖畔詩人) passionate romantic utterances; Li Jinfa’s 李金髮 (1900–1976) symbolist experimentation; and Wang Duqing’s 王獨清 (1898–1940), Mu Mutian’s 穆木天 (1900–1971), and Feng Naichao’s 馮乃超 (1901–1983) play with modernism were all considered to fall under the broad rubric of lyrical articulations. Lyricism was manifested in other genres too. Lu Xun’s and Zhou Zuoren’s prose, Yu Dafu’s 郁達夫 (1896–1945) and Lu Yin’s 廬隱 (1898–1934) fiction, and Bai Wei’s 白薇 (1894–1987) and Tao Jingsun’s 陶晶孫 (1897–1952) dramas display each author’s aptitude, emotional abundance, and linguistic exuberance in a way described alternately as lyrical and romantic.
The symbiotic relationship between the (Chinese) lyrical and the romantic is most strongly exemplified by Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897–1931) and Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892–1978). A lover of Keats and Shelley, Xu is said to have been the first to successfully naturalize Western Romantic poetry in Chinese form. Works such as “A Night in Florence” 翡冷翠的一夜 (Feilengcui de yiye) were immediate hits, due to their passionate outpouring of emotions, innovative metrical structure, and splendid imagery. Xu Zhimo’s love poems and love stories may appear too sentimental to readers of later generations,38 but in the turbulent post-May Fourth era, his determination to pursue love, and love only, against all codes of propriety bespoke a modern, defiant posture to which his poems became the textual testimony. Xu’s mentor, Liang Qichao, best summarized his attitude in a letter in 1923: “He who possesses an excess of emotions and feelings is destined to undergo drastic ups and downs in his imaginary pursuit. … He can never attain the sacred land he is dreaming of, and thus feels discontent throughout his life.”39
Guo Moruo started to write poems when studying in Japan in the 1910s. He was so inspired by the May Fourth Movement that, between 1919 and 1920, he churned out works such as “Fenghuang niepan” 鳳凰涅槃 (Phoenix nirvana), “Diqiu, wode muqin” 地球, 我的母親 (Earth, my mother), and “Tiangou” 天狗 (Heavenly dog) that best represent the passion and dynamism of the time. “Phoenix Nirvana,” for instance, describes the world in a drastic mutation; earth and sea, globe and universe are called on to celebrate a cosmos energized by the power of destruction and rebirth. Guo nevertheless considered himself a lyricist. He claims that “lyrical poetry is the straightforward expression of feeling,” and the “‘rhythm’ formed by emotional reverberations is the form of poetry.”40 He calls on Shelley and compares his poetic power to “troubled water … which gives rise to waves whenever the wind blows, containing all the reflections of cosmic dynamics. This wind is the so-called intuition, inspiration.”41
The May Fourth enthusiasm for lyricism/romanticism backfired in the mid-1920s. By then shuqing had increasingly become associated with self-indulgence, solipsism, sentimentalism, and bourgeois decadence. The most vociferous attack came from Liang Shiqiu in 1926:
Lyricism is permeating everywhere in modern Chinese literature … the amount of romantic poetry in recent years has become immeasurable. … The so-called New Literature Movement, thanks to foreign influences, continuously asks for expansion, liberation, freedom. As a result, emotion, just like a caged tiger, has found a way not only to break with the shackles of propriety but also to collapse the reason that oversees emotion.42
As mentioned above, Liang had once been a supporter of the lyrical/romantic discourse. He changed his stance, however, as a result of studying with Irving Babbitt (1865–1933), master of New Humanism, at Harvard during 1924 and 1925. Liang contends that decorum and edification are more important for a society inundated with excessive sentiments and irresponsible outcries. Instead of shuqing (lyrical, lyric), Liang Shiqiu uses shuqing zhuyi 抒情主義 (lyricism) in his essay to describe the kind of mind-set and writing he takes issue with.43 This term had a political connotation in the context of the mid-1920s, as it brought to mind other “isms” then arising, such as nationalism (minzu zhuyi 民族主義) and communism (gongchan zhuyi 共產主義). Although he meant only to ridicule his erstwhile fellow lyricists/romantics, Liang inadvertently touched the polemical nerve embedded in modern Chinese lyrical discourse. His charge against lyricism soon ignited a battle among literati in terms of left versus right,44 and he has since been labeled conservative.
Our concern here is twofold. First, the extant paradigm of modern Chinese literary history tends to streamline the multiple lyrical provocations of this era into the discourse of romanticism. The assumption is that romanticism, as a cultural institution, a literary style, and a revolutionary impetus introduced from the West (and sometimes via Japan), best defines the habitus that informed the desire of one generation of Chinese for emancipation and autonomy.45 But in haste to generalize the process of Chinese literary modernization, scholars may have too readily equated the Chinese shuqing to the “lyrical” in romantic terms, and overlooked the rich implications arising from the transcultural dynamics in between. Critics have noted that the importation of Western Romanticism into early modern China cannot be regarded as the sole reason for the literati’s and intellectuals’ renewed pursuit of interiority versus exteriority. For instance, Kirk Denton points out that the May Fourth romantics experienced a profound anxiety in adopting the Western Romantic modern idea of an autonomous ego, despite their manifest egoism. This tension may reflect the fundamental difference between Chinese and Western literary ideas of cosmology. That is, despite their iconoclastic agenda, Chinese moderns have all along harbored reservations about the Romantic canon of absolute ego apart from the divine, society, or nation; they were more inclined to seek new intellectual and imaginary sources through which to reengage with the public domain.46 Romanticism played a complex role in that it not only brought to China something unprecedented but also, more importantly, helped “reprogram” select elements inherent in Chinese lyrical tradition. The result is a fascinating collision and coalition between indigenous and foreign linguistic and conceptual sources. At this juncture, the resurgence of Chinese shuqing/lyrical became most stimulating.
The modern rediscovery of three moments of premodern Chinese literary history, the Six Dynasties, the late Tang, and the late Ming, serves as a good example. In their pursuit of individualist integrity, the May Fourth literati from Lu Xun to Zhou Zuoren, Zhu Guangqian, Zong Baihua, and Tai Jingnong, among others, found models in the Six Dynasties such as Ji Kang 嵇康 (223–262) and Ruan Ji 阮籍 (210–263), as if these medieval figures’ idiosyncratic thoughts and manners had a modernist dimension. Tao Qian 陶潛 (365?–427), above all, stands out as embodying the virtue of both idyllic autonomy and intellectual nonconformism.47 Meanwhile, Zhou Zuoren and his followers rediscovered the late Ming aesthetics of refined taste and nonchalant style, which they believed anticipated the modern subjectivity’s penchant for selfhood and feeling.48 Finally, the 1930s saw a trend among the Beijing modernists of emulating late Tang poetry and poetics. Having been exposed to French symbolism and Continental and Anglo-American modernism, poets such as Fei Ming, He Qifang, and Lin Geng came to appreciate the “modernity” of late Tang poetry in terms of its opulent imagery, decadent mannerisms, and elaborate intertextuality.49
These three rediscoveries were undertaken by literati and intellectuals who were neither literary conservatives nor cultural loyalists. Their immersion in Western and Japanese learning and new-style writings enabled them to play leading roles in the New Literature Movement. But at one point of their modernist careers, they came to realize that the New Literature as they had practiced it might have betrayed its limitations. Where it sets old values free, New Literature imposes new strictures; where it incites “calls to arms,” it is ever ready to silence rebellious echoes. Thus, when they were looking for an alternative understanding of modernity, they were compelled to reassess the tradition they were supposed to oppose. Along the way, they read much of their own intent into the traditions under reexamination. But it was a case not so much of misreading as of willful anachronism, synchronizing fragments of the past and present so as to redraw the boundaries of the modern.
The second point of concern here is that if the exchange of indigenous and foreign sources helped expand the parameters of the Chinese moderns’ lyrical imagination, the “lyrical tradition” as conceived of by critics such as Chen Shih-hsiang is subject to reconsideration. As argued in the introduction, Chen invokes the “lyrical tradition” as the essence of Chinese literature, which he seems to believe vanished on the eve of the modern era. But insofar as “tradition” or “traditionalism” constitutes a crucial part of the dialectic of modernity, Chen’s observation falls prey to a historicism that essentializes the pastness of the past. One way to supplement this idea is to stress the fact that “tradition” would not have come into view if no change—or novelty—had ever happened to upset the status quo.50
According to Chen, “the lyrical tradition” underwent an enormous reconfiguration in the Ming period when vernacular fiction and drama found their way into the canon, rendering lyrical soundings through different rhetorical and generic channels. If this is the case, the “lyrical tradition” underwent another transformation in the modern time. One can argue that the importation of foreign concepts, genres, and apparatus in the late nineteenth century did not drive the “lyrical tradition” to extinction, as Chen and his followers insinuate, but helped open up a new ground for deliberating the poetics and politics of Chinese interiority. Therefore, the confusion about the terms and premises of lyricism, romanticism, revolutionism, and other discursive values among modern Chinese intellectuals and literati can be taken as a symptom of the “confusion” of temporalities, localities, and discourses. A truly productive way to assess the “lyrical tradition” in modern times, accordingly, is not to create an insular domain of the Chinese lyrical but to examine the way the tradition reconfigures its sphere by interacting with recently imported stimuli.
Let us take one more look at the four inaugural figures of modern Chinese lyrical discourse—Lu Xun, Wang Guowei, Guo Moruo, and Liang Qichao—and how they updated their agendas in the aftermath of the May Fourth Movement. Years after his search for the Mara poet, Lu Xun wrote in his essay “Xiwang” 希望 (Hope) in 1925, “My heart is extraordinarily lonely. But my heart is very tranquil, void of love and hate, joy and sadness, color and sound.”51 By then, he had witnessed the rise and dissipation of the May Fourth passion and suffered from a prolonged ordeal in his personal life, and he took up the hybrid genre of poetic prose to express his ambivalent feelings. Despair and hope, dream and insomnia, life and afterlife, among other thematic antinomies, form a vertiginous cycle in his thoughts and words. Qu Yuan and Petöfi Sándor, classical-style doggerel and Nietzschean aphorisms, Buddhist imagery and Gothic motifs all contribute to a lyrical vision that is both traditional and antitraditional. As he makes his poetic subjectivity a self-cannibalistic corpse in “Mujiewen” 墓碣文 (Epitaph, 1925), Lu Xun provides a polemic of lyrical subjectivity against itself:
… I tore out my heart to eat it, wanting to know the true taste. But the pain was so agonizing, how could I tell its taste? …
… When the pain subsided, I savored the heart slowly. But since by then it was stale, how could I know its true taste? …
… Answer me. Or be gone!52
On June 2, 1927, Wang Guowei drowned himself in a pond of the Imperial Garden. His brief will states: “After fifty years of living in this world, the only thing yet to happen to me is death; having been through such historical turmoil, nothing further can stain my integrity.”53 Wang’s suicide has been attributed to, among other causes, domestic and psychological turbulence, his immersion in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and his eschatological vision. Above all, as a political conservative, Wang Guowei is said to have ended his life out of Qing loyalism. However, Chen Yinke 陳寅恪 (1890–1969) describes his drowning as consummating “the thought of freedom, and the spirit of independence.”54 To take Chen’s point one step further, one may argue that Wang’s “freedom” and “independence” make sense not as a political belief but as a poetic pursuit, a “mental vista,” as he discusses in Remarks on Song Lyrics and the Human Condition. For at the beginning of the Chinese modern age, he had already discerned the modern as something more than the staged realization of enlightenment and revolution. Faced with the drastic incompatibilities between public and private claims, he asserted his freedom and independence negatively, in the willful act of self-annihilation. His death recalls Qu Yuan’s drowning—the “arch-lyrical occasion” in the Chinese cultural and literary imaginary.55 But insofar as it blurs different conceptual paradigms and temporalities, it is a radical lyrical project of self-cancellation, reflecting the aporia of a time known for its pursuit of reason, progress, and change.
Where Lu Xun and Wang Guowei strove to cope with the (fatal) impasse of the modern, lyrical vision they each had once sanctified, Guo Moruo took a leftist turn in the mid-1920s, transforming his lyrical/romantic yearning into a revolutionary gospel. He now claimed that “romantic literature has long become antirevolutionary literature,” and that a modern Chinese poet must transcend his individual, bourgeois sentiment to express a universal, altruistic passion.56 Critics have pointed out that the way Guo Moruo revolutionized his poetic career was not a reversal but an escalation of his earlier romantic obsession.57 When Vladimir Mayakovsky replaced Walt Whitman as his idol, Guo let supernal revolutionary ecstasy overwrite his erstwhile self-indulgence. Although he fashioned himself as an avant-garde writer heralding the newest Western ideology, Guo was also responding to the poetics in Chinese antiquity. His outcries would not have sounded so enchanting to Chinese ears without the Daoist anarchistic undertone or the echoes from the “leftist” camp of the Wang Yangming school of Confucianism.58 His celebration of affective subjectivity, historical dynamism, and apocalyptic breakthrough represents a modern outburst of what underlies the poetry of Gong Zizhen 龔自珍 (1792–1841), the greatest of the late Qing poets.59
Although Liang Qichao remained a cultural celebrity in the Republican era, he was deemed out of tune with his time. While acknowledging his contribution to literary revolution at its inchoate stage, people tend to overlook the fact that Liang was continuously reflecting on his poetics till the end of his life. Instead of expressing the didacticism and ameliorism that characterize his early treatise, Liang in his later years attended to the aesthetics of quwei 趣味 (contentment).60 This may sound like a rehash of the late Ming elite’s penchant for refined taste (quwei 趣味), but it is not. Liang argues that as a poetic disposition, quwei partakes of the Kantian aesthetics of disinterestedness as well as the Confucian ethics of ren or benevolence. But quwei will not be realized until after the subjectivity has committed to history by means of sociopolitical undertakings.61 Reviewing the ups and downs of his own career, Liang observes two essential actions: zhibuke erwei 知不可而為 (continued engagement regardless of anticipated failure); weier buyou 為而不有 (continued engagement without any claim of credit).62 That is, one’s sense of fulfillment is judged not by the outcome of engagement with a certain goal but by a “feeling” of worthiness in the process of the engagement. Such an engagement suggests Kantian “disinterestedness” insofar as it elicits an (aesthetic) end on its own terms; it suggests Confucian benevolence insofar as it entertains a vision of humanistic compassion.63
Because of its stress on aesthetic/ethical self-containment, quwei enables Liang Qichao to imagine history and human agency in a new light. He stresses that quwei “arises from the coupling between innate feeling and external environmental impetus. From a total social angle, each period has its own quwei; from an individual angle, quwei changes all the time.”64 Thanks to the intermediary of quwei, history makes sense to us not through any causal logic but through “mutual connectivity” (huyuan 互緣), of which heterogeneity (bugongxiang 不共相) and mutability (dongxiang 動相) are the conditions. “Under these circumstances, foregoing and succeeding waves, linkages, and mutations (of the predestined mutual engagements) form an immense and unfathomable sea of history.”65
Liang Qichao passed away in 1929, three decades after he first promoted a “poetry revolution.” He lived long enough to see how his polemics of qing generated a wide range of repercussions, so extensive that, ironically, his later proposals such as quwei were eclipsed. Nevertheless, by elucidating a poetic autonomy derived from but not conditioned by the consequences of historical experience, Liang managed to envisage a subjectivity free from the angst that (fatally) trapped Lu Xun and Wang Guowei, and he did not let himself succumb to the fervor of revolutionary collectivity, as did Guo Moruo. It would be many more decades before people realized how Liang’s later thought provided an alternative to the lyrical debate of the post-May Fourth era.
Lyricism Against the Historical Grain
In December 1935, Zhu Guangqian published an essay discussing the regulated poem by the Tang poet Qian Qi 錢起 (722–780), “Shengshi xiangling guse” 省試湘靈鼓瑟 (A poem composed at the capital exam: “Spirits of the River Xiang playing the zither”). The poem describes the power of music that enchants both humans and immortals, even moving the animate and inanimate worlds. Zhu particularly appreciates the last couplet:
The tune ended, but nowhere was the player seen;
above the river, a few peaks loom lush green.66
曲終人不見
江上數峰青
Zhu writes:
The highest realm in art is not passion but serenity. Perhaps a poet’s human experience of joy and sorrow is more passionate than that of other men; but when, as a poet, he comes to express that passion, it matures like a vintage wine, it loses its sharpness, and acquires a mellow bouquet. This is serenity. It is a lofty ideal, and is not to be found in ordinary poetry. Ancient Greece, and especially ancient Greek sculpture, conveys this sense of serenity. It is a realm of utter enlightenment and peace, rather like that of the contemplative Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin. Serenity is above human joy and sorrow. Indeed it washes away joy and sorrow. A realm such as this is seldom found in Chinese poetry. Qu Yuan, Ruan Ji, Li Bo and Du Fu lapse too often into passion and righteous indignation. But Tao Yuanming is all serenity. Hence his greatness.67
Zhu’s interpretation drew a bitter rebuttal from Lu Xun:
Extracts and anthologies can be highly misleading. Suppose you take Tao Yuanming’s lines “I pluck chrysanthemum under the eastern hedge / And gaze after towards the southern mountain,” and you ignore other poems of his; by lifting lines out of context in this fashion, you can make him into the most wonderfully unworldly figure. … Serious readers should never rely on extracts. They should read more extensively for themselves, and then they will see that none of the great writers of the past was all “serenity.” Tao Yuanming was great precisely because he was not “all serenity.”68
The confrontation merits attention not only because it involves two leading figures of Chinese literature at the time but also because it touches on the fundamental difference between two critical methodologies and historical views regarding Chinese lyricism of the thirties. The fact that the debate is about a Tang poem suggests all the more the intricate relationship between the “lyrical tradition” and modern concerns. For Zhu Guangqian, Qian Qi’s poem excels because it celebrates not music as such, but the melodic feeling of serenity (jingmu 靜穆) disseminated by music. Lu Xun, however, points out that such a reading de-historicizes the context in which the poem was composed, and worse, foregrounds a singular couplet at the expense of its intertextual references: Qian Qi wrote the poem at an exam for self-advancement, and his topic is nothing personal or spontaneous but one drawn from the conventional repertoire. Above all, Lu Xun is exasperated by Zhu Guangqian’s proposal that serenity be the ultimate affective output of poetry.
As discussed in the introduction, Zhu Guangqian was a leading aesthetician in the thirties, known for his dedication to Nietzsche, Bullough, and particularly Croce. He also played a major role in the Beijing school of modernism. Midway through the decade, Zhu started to develop his own brand of aesthetics, with Wang Guowei as his model. In the Qian Qi case, Zhu derives his concept of serenity from the traditional treatise on “spiritual resonance” (shenyun 神韻) as well as Wang Guowei’s “mental vista,” while entertaining Western theories such as Nietzsche’s Apollonianism versus Dionysianism, Bullough’s theory of emotional distance, Wordsworth’s notion of lyrical tranquility regained after emotional outburst, and most importantly, Croce’s philosophy of intuition. Thus Zhu’s reading of Qian Qi’s poem serves three purposes: to illuminate his aesthetic vision as shared by his Beijing modernist colleagues, to offer a reappraisal of classical literature in modern terms, and to highlight the mutual illumination of Western and Chinese lyrical poetics.
Zhu Guangqian’s essay appears to encapsulate what Lu Xun’s literary and political crusade is against. An advocate for Mara poetry in his early days, Lu Xun envisages literature as that which “disturbs the heart,” upsetting rather than tranquilizing the status quo. In sharp contrast with Zhu, he sees no reason for poetry to do away with passion in deference to serenity. Moreover, by 1935, Lu Xun had established himself in Shanghai as a champion for revolutionary literature in opposition to Beijing modernism.
Lu Xun regards Zhu’s omission of history as unforgivable, and he carefully reads the Tang exam system back into Qian Qi’s poem in question. An exegesis of a text against its context, Lu Xun’s methodology appears to be conventional at first look, but its subtext leads him to affirm that history is nothing if not a continued interaction between individual whims and social dynamics, particularity and generality. Lu Xun then sarcastically proposes that not only Qian Qi’s poem but also Zhu Guangqian’s ahistorical reading of the poem should be subject to contextual scrutiny. As the master insinuates, at a time of historical crises, any claim to “serenity” is a symptom of complacency and escapism. He might have a good point: a massive anti-Japanese student demonstration broke out in Peking on December 9, 1935, its bloody outcome coinciding with Zhu Guangqian’s presentation of the poetics of serenity.
Critics have described the debate between Zhu Guangqian and Lu Xun in antagonistic terms, such as liberalism versus Marxism; formalist aesthetics versus revolutionary volitionism; Beijing modernism versus the League of Leftist Writers, and even the Tongcheng School, which favors rhetorical expertise, versus the Han-Song School, which stresses philological exegesis.69 This contrastive reading is an oversimplification. For both Zhu Guangqian and Lu Xun are seeking to answer the question, each in his own way, how a poetic subjectivity can help illuminate historical circumstances. Whereas Zhu Guangqian indicates that history makes sense through a poetic distillation of ephemeral human experience, Lu Xun considers history an opaque flux whose meaning cannot be elucidated, only brought to prominence by poetic means.
For decades Zhu has been accused of inhabiting the ivory tower and indulging in refined sentiments. The fact is that Zhu was keenly aware of the menacing threats of reality, and he hoped to invest in the poetics of serenity a way to redeem rather than eschew them. His first major book, Beiju xinlixue 悲劇心理學 (Psychology of tragedy), expounds the power of tragedy in light of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.70 For Zhu, tragedy, the predominant genre of Western literature, is both the symptom of and the remedy for human deficiencies in engaging the world. He draws his understanding of catharsis—the therapeutic effect of tragedy—from the Nietzschean dialectic of Apollonian tranquility overcoming Dionysian chaos. Seeing that Chinese literature is short of tragedy, Zhu elects lyrical poetry as an equivalent genre, and discovers in it serenity as the emotive agency effecting a cathartic outcome.
Lu Xun, in contrast, was never a naïve follower of either historicism or revolutionism. He shared Zhu’s appreciation of the intermediary power of poetry, but found the poetics of serenity too gentle to warrant a cathartic outcome. By stressing passion, nevertheless, Lu Xun did not mean to echo the leftist romantic call for a politicized affect; rather, he sought to reinstate the radical vein of lyrical tradition downplayed by modern literati. His interpretation of Qu Yuan as well as the Six Dynasties poets, particularly Tao Qian, comes to mind. Passion, as Lu Xun conceives it, engages one not only with social and political evils but also with the “stratagem of unnamable entities” (wuwu zhizhen 無物之陣)—the amorphous existence of nihilism—permeating the world. That is, zeal generates not only revolutionary momentum but also an “involutionary” thrust, underlined by entropic desire and self-reflexive ambivalence. Lu Xun’s lyricism instantiates the desolate struggle of a lonely soul between “calling to arms” and “wandering.”71
ALONG WITH THE DEBATE between Lu Xun and Zhu Guangqian, 1935 saw an imaginary dialogue between Liang Zongdai 梁宗岱 (1903–1983) and Qu Qiubai regarding the modern potential of lyricism. Trained in France, Liang Zongdai was arguably the leading interpreter of French symbolism in 1930s China, particularly known for his rendition and critique of Paul Valéry. Qu Qiubai, by contrast, acquired his revolutionary training in Moscow and was among the most prominent Chinese Communist leaders before his execution by the Nationalist regime in 1935. The two could not have stood further apart in terms of either aesthetic taste or ideological commitment. But an unlikely correspondence arose between them when they came to draw inspiration from the Chinese lyrical heritage.
For Liang Zongdai, poetry is the most exquisite configuration of language, sound, and imagery, free of all objective references to scenes, narrative, reasoning, and sentiments. To that effect, Liang echoes Zhu Guangqian’s poetics of serenity. In 1935, Liang published Shi yu zhen 詩與真 (Poetry and truth), a collection of essays of his reflections on European symbolism. With Valéry as his example, he passionately proposes that poetry is a “pure form, and that pure poetry is nothing but a ‘poeticization of the soul as it is.’” The ultimate form of poetry is at the same time a philosophical statement of what poetry is:
Let the ether of the Universe filter into our minds, forming a profound correspondence of feelings: the object and the subject experience the same palpitation, tapping to the same rhythm. What appears before us is no longer a grain of sand, a wildflower, or a piece of broken tile, but an encounter between a free, lively soul and our own souls by chance.72
The search for a pure form of poetry—especially in the spirit of French symbolism—had been a trend since the early twenties, as demonstrated by the works of Mu Mutian, Wang Duqing, Li Jinfa, and Dai Wangshu. But none could have emulated Liang in teasing out the subtlety and mysticism inherent in symbolist poetics. Besides Valéry, Liang introduced to Chinese readers other French poets such as Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire. He comments on Baudelaire:
Judging from his subject matter, nothing can be more plain, contingent, perishable, and—how could I say it—ugly and obscene than that which appears in Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. But none of the poems in the collection cannot be said to have accomplished an intimacy of the most internal kind and a grandeur that withstands time.73
But what makes Liang Zongdai’s poetics peculiar is the way he juxtaposes symbolism and traditional Chinese poetics, making some of the most provocative statements regarding Chinese-Western comparative literature in the early days of that field. In his “Tanshi” 談詩 (On poetry, 1934), Liang compares Mallarmé with the Song song lyricist Jiang Kui 姜夔 (1155–1209), in that both favor a “poetics of difficulty.” For the former, “a poet excels only when struggling to complete a difficult piece”; for the latter, “a poem showing no sense of being difficult equates to naught.”74 By “difficult,” Liang means mainly formal intricacy and semantic obscurity. For him, the “difficult” device functions like an esoteric password with which one is directed into the deep niche of the poets’ hearts, or the fundamental longing of their souls.75
Liang makes an even bolder observation by likening symbolization (xiangzheng 象徵) to xing or evocation, as evinced in the Classic of Poetry. Referring to the definition in Literary Mind and Carving the Dragon, “Xing rouses. … That which rouses the affections depends on something subtle for the sake of reflective consideration,”76 he contends that “by ‘something minute’ [wei 微], [xing] intimates the subtle relationship between two things which may look irrelevant to each other on the surface yet can be mutually implicated. Feeling can be generated by ‘referring to something minute and subtle that evokes the associative consideration of the other.’”77 Through the resonance between the poetic mind and things in the world, Liang calls forth the visionary state (靈境 lingjing), which he contends is not unlike the Baudelairean “correspondence.”78 Liang’s equation of xing and “symbol” is suggestive indeed. But he risks overlooking the incongruous roots of the two concepts. Stephen Owen contrasts xing with Western metaphorism as follows:
While xing can often, on close reflection, be found to have some metaphorical basis, the issue of xing in traditional literary thought lies outside the Western scope of metaphor: [xing] is not how a word is carried over from its proper sense to a new one, but rather how the presentation of some phenomenon … in words is mysteriously able to stir a response or evoke a mood. Such a response, as it occurs, is prereflective and hidden from the understanding.79
When Beijing critics such as Zhu Guangqian and Liang Zongdai were seeking to form a lyricism that would speak to their modernist concerns, their leftist counterparts were undertaking a different task. Poets such as Guo Moruo, Jiang Guangci, Wang Duqing, and Mu Mutian were either romantics or symbolists in their early days; they took a leftist turn in the mid-1920s so as to find a political anchor for their radical impulses. At their most wishful, they lyricize revolution unconditionally. Jiang Guangci serves as a good example: “The true poet cannot help feeling the same ground he shares with revolution. The poet … is more capable of understanding revolution than anybody else!”80 Still, the case of Qu Qiubai stands out as the most complex. Qu was among the earliest group of Chinese Communists trained in the Soviet Union, and his literary criticism clearly reflects his ideological agenda. In “Yishu yu rensheng” 藝術與人生 (Art and life, 1923), Qu argues that “pure art can prevail only when a society is in a peaceful time; but in view of the fact that our life is beset by torrential forces, there is no room for any poet dwelling on art for art’s sake. For our world finds no use for him.”81 Qu became ever more militant as he rose to the top of the party hierarchy: “generally speaking, all literature is inflammation and propaganda, either wittingly or unwittingly. … Literature serves always as political ‘phonograph.’”82 His radicalism led him to promote the Latinization of Chinese characters in hopes of abolishing the Chinese script and, by extension, Chinese cultural and literary heritage, completely.83
Paradoxically, Qu Qiubai turns out to be a tender-hearted writer whenever engaged in literature on a personal level. He loved Pushkin and Tolstoy and was very conversant with classical Chinese poetry.84 Both his Exiang jicheng 餓鄉紀程 (A journey to the country of hunger, 1922) and Chidu xinshi 赤都心史 (A spiritual pilgrimage to the red capital, 1924), though labeled as reportage, foreground a solitary soul in search of meaning amid revolutionary calls to arms. His descriptions of his nocturnal train ride across the snowy Siberian plains, his melancholy sojourn in the Red Capital, and his ominous awareness of his tuberculosis, among others, make him sound more like a late nineteenth-century “superfluous man” than a modern Communist vanguard.
Qu is self-conscious about the contradictory pulls in himself: his political instrumentalism is underlined by a Buddhist realization of the futility of any human pursuit; his iconoclastic image can barely hide his memory as the son of a declined literati family. Above all, deep inside Qu’s revolutionary posture is a lyrical heart. Both his poetry and prose suggest a persona repressed by either external adversities or inner discontent. This persona does not merely present a modern, leftist volition; he moves us because he embodies a certain classical poetic bearing. In contrast with Liang Zongdai, who upholds xing as a way to Sinicize symbolism, Qu comes across like a spokesman for the time-honored trope of yuan or discontent.85 When he describes his loneliness resulting from familial and social disenfranchisements, Qu impresses as an “alienated person who invests his rancor in poetry” (liqun tuoshi yiyuan 離群托詩以怨).86 When he promotes the proletarian revolution, Qu poses like a modern interpreter: “the tones of an age of turmoil are bitter and full of anger: its government is perverse” (Luanshi zhiyin yuan yi nu; qizheng guai 亂世之音怨以怒: 其政乖).87
Qu’s lyrical sentiment is most poignantly expressed by his memoir, Duoyu dehua 多餘的話 (Superfluous words, 1935), allegedly written only a few days before his execution by the Nationalists. In it, Qu looks back at his abject family life and tortuous revolutionary pursuit and concludes that he is a man of “frail split personality,” torn between action and thought, masses and self, martyrdom and clowning.88 Qu is also torn between yuan as individual melancholy and yuan as collective wrath. Indeed, he rejects a “pure” poetic vocation in deference to political commitment, but in the end he let his own last words overwrite what he believed he had chosen.
Most suggestively, Superfluous Words is headed by an epigraph: “Those who know me will say my heart is sad and bleak; those who don’t know me may ask me for what I seek——hence why bother to say it?”89 The quote is from the Classic of Poetry, presumably a statement made by an ancient Zhou loyalist who fell into deep pathos after the demise of the dynasty. By referring to the “feudal history” of China and identifying himself with the loyalist, Qu Qiubai was bound to arouse suspicion. His anachronism nevertheless illuminates an intricate case of revolutionary lyricism. Behind the Internationale for which he presumably died, one hears echoes of melancholy sighs from ancient times. Even the title of Qu’s memoir, “superfluous words,” yields a double meaning: redundant words that fail to achieve the “economy” of revolutionary commitment, or unsolicited words that bring an “apostrophe,” a lyrical pause, to the otherwise streamlined master narrative of revolutionary martyrdom.
MY THIRD CASE PERTAINS to two treatises on lyricism with the identical title Shilun 詩論 (Treatise on poetry), by Ai Qing and Zhu Guangqian. Ai Qing started his career as an art major; he traveled to France to study painting in 1929, only to be fascinated by modern poets from Walt Whitman to Charles Baudelaire, Emile Verhaeren, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Returning to China in 1932, Ai Qing was already a modernist poet and a political activist. Some of his best poems written during this time, such as “Ludi” 蘆笛 (Reed flute) and “Paris” 巴黎, bear clear European influence. Whereas “Paris” was inspired by Baudelaire, “Reed Flute” was dedicated to Apollinaire. Ai Qing found his kindred spirits particularly in two Russian poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) and Sergei Esenin (1895–1930). He learned from the former the exuberant power of social critique and self-expression, and from the latter a profound feeling for land and peasantry. What distinguishes Ai Qing from his fellow leftist poets is his conviction that language and ideology, feeling and action are complementary, and he is never afraid of spelling that out.90 As a result, he was called a leftist modernist,91 and he paid a heavy price for taking such a stance. As his famous poem “Chuihao zhe” 吹號者 (The bugler, 1939) goes,
The bugler’s fate is sorrowful.
When his breath rubs against the bugle’s copper surface to make a sound,
often, fine, barely visible streaks of blood
fly out with the sound of the bugle.92
吹號者的命運是悲苦的，
當他用自己的呼吸摩擦了號角的銅皮使號角發出聲響的時候，
常常有細到看不見的血絲，
隨著號聲飛出來.
Ai Qing started in the mid-thirties to jot down his observations regarding composing poetry in a revolutionary time, and the result is Treatise on Poetry.93 Coincidently, in parallel to Ai Qing’s endeavor, Zhu Guangqian had conceived of a project of the same title since the mid-thirties. Ai Qing’s Treatise on Poetry was published in 1941;94 Zhu Guangqian’s came out in 1942. Ai Qing’s volume comprises fifteen sections, each featuring a series of reflections on subjects ranging from aesthetics to morality, thought, life, and revolution. These reflections are rendered in aphoristic remarks, punctuated with provocative sparks. Critics have even suggested that Ai Qing was a modern interpreter of the shihua 詩話 (remarks on poetry) tradition.95
Granting his revolutionary sentiment, Ai Qing talks over and over about the importance of lyrical sensibility. He famously notes, “lyricism is a plant saturated with moisture,” and critiques the “naïveté” of “those who denounce the lyrical because of their love for the mineral.”96 Above all, “human beings cannot live without feeling; just as feeling is to life, so lyricism is to poetry. … People tend to mistake the lyrical for the sentimental, which results in an equation of lyricism and sentimentalism.”97 Ai Qing argues that only through lyricism can “someone who can feel” become “someone who can act.”98 Poetry is the result of “a painful labor,” and yet the “voice of poetry spells out freedom.”99 Equally important, he believes that poetry is propaganda by nature: a good poem cannot but draw its audience to support the poet’s feeling and belief. He therefore urges fellow writers to treat “sadness and pathos as a form of power! To summon the aspiration, sense of injustice, indignation together, forming a dark heavy cloud in anticipation of the arrival of a tempestuous storm!”100
Zhu Guangqian’s Treatise on Poetry comprises ten chapters.101 Unlike Ai Qing’s work, which looks like a compilation of random thoughts under thematic headings, Zhu’s work is systematic and scholarly. Instead of asking ontological questions such as what is poetry, Zhu starts by studying the origin of poetry as a major artistic engagement of ancient times, next to dance and music. He highlights musicality as the essence of poetic expression, stating that poetry is “pure literature endowed with musical rhythm.”102 Although most of his examples are drawn from classical poetry, the question that concerns Zhu most is why modern Chinese poetry has yet to establish its own generic attributes and formal conventions. For Zhu, sound, caesura, and rhyme constitute the three major components; without formulating its own rules, modern poetry can hardly overtake classical poetry. But this should not be seen merely as a predilection for stylistic craftsmanship. Zhu’s poetic worldview demands paying just as much attention to the linguistic surface of a work as to the “deep” meanings beneath it. In other words, meaning is neither exterior nor anterior to language; the two are coterminous and inseparable.
The differences between Zhu Guanqian’s and Ai Qing’s Treatise on Poetry are clear. Zhu describes poetry as a product of “play” and rhetorical “concealment and conceit”; he is proposing a formalism in which meaning is tied inextricably to each unique utterance. Ai Qing describes poetry as a labor resulting from pain and historical pathos (youhuan 憂患): “Asking a poet of our time not to feel historical pathos is like asking a farmer trapped in a muddy life not to feel sad.”103 Zhu highlights Crocean aesthetics, the confluence between modern and classical sensibilities, and the redeeming power of Kantian disinterestedness; Ai Qing takes it as his mission to inscribe social injustice and calls for the revolutionary agency of poetic evocation. Still, they shared ground. As critics have suggested, their treatises represent the two most important contributions to modern Chinese poetics since Wang Guowei’s Remarks on Song Lyrics and the Human Condition.104 Whereas Zhu Guangqian seeks to fashion modern lyrical subjectivity by recapitulating Wang Guowei’s “mental vista,” Ai Qing appreciates the organic agency arising therefrom. He refers to the mid-Tang poet Bai Juyi’s dictum, “poetry is that which is rooted in feeling, sprouting through language, blooming in sound, and fruiting in meaning.”105 Zhu Guangqian, as discussed above, ruminates on lyrical transcendence only insofar as he is keenly aware of historical imperfections, while Ai Qing never ceases to contemplate the dialectic between affective autonomy and political commitment. Beyond surface political stances, both believe that the poetic presentation of life is an engagement with language and form, which are in incessant mutation, rather than an outcome of logical or ideological prefiguration. Emphasis on language and poetic expression is also confirmation of a writer’s capacity in “figuring” out the world.
“Exiling Lyricism”
In May 1939, a young modernist poet, Xu Chi, published an essay, “Shuqing de fangzhu” 抒情的放逐 (Exiling lyricism), which ignited a vehement debate over the feasibility of lyricism vis-à-vis historical crisis. By then the Second Sino-Japanese War was in its third year. Taking refuge in Hong Kong, Xu commented:
People may have already got used to a life without lyricism, but they may have yet to get used to poetry without lyricism. I think the war has given us a good opportunity to learn this fact. For thousands of years we have never been short of poetic lines and elegant words … but during this war, we have come to feel repugnance toward sentimental lives. … Many human beings have been bombed to death; so has lyricism. But poetry survives—a poetry inscribing the spirit that enables us to live amid bombs. What kind of poetry do you think this will be?106
Xu Chi’s call for exiling lyricism drew immediate attacks from both leftist and rightist camps, including some of the most famous names, such as Guo Moruo and Hu Feng. Xu may have been surprised by the negative responses, for the “lyricism” he proposed to exile is defined as a synonym for sentimentalism, individualism, and dilettantism—traits that had already been denounced by poets and critics before the war broke out. A closer look at the debate tells us more about the stakes of writing poetry at a volatile time and the untenability of the concept of shuqing in modern Chinese literary discourse.
In a way, except for the wartime context, Xu’s statement expresses nothing new since Liang Shiqiu attacked lyricism in 1926. But unlike Liang, who spoke from the New Humanist viewpoint, Xu makes his case as a modernist. Xu proposes to banish lyricism because he wants to uphold the modernist criteria as exemplified by someone like T. S. Eliot: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”107 A poem can become “strong” by the poet exercising intellect rather than indulging in sentiment. However, Xu contends that poetry should inscribe nothing transcendental but the ethos of the time, a stance he acquired from poets such as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, both popular names to wartime Chinese poets and poetry readers. Xu was not alone. As Zhang Songjian points out, young poets such as Ouwaiou 鷗外鷗 (1911–1995) and Hu Mingshu 胡明樹 (1914–1977) also favored the notion of antilyricism.108 Still, Xu’s statement is so inflammatory, or so unabashedly “lyrical” by his own negative definition of the term, as to contradict his poetics of coldness and rationality.
The case of Xu Chi may serve as a vantage point from which to view the dynamics of lyrical discourse in the 1940s. One striking fact is that the most vociferous defenders of lyricism came from the leftist camp. Guo Moruo, for instance, believed that only lyrical poetry could incite national, anti-Japanese solidarity, a stance endorsed by his followers, such as Pu Feng and Mu Mutian. Instead of exiling lyricism, they considered amplifying the emotional impact of lyrical poetry traditionally reserved for the elite; they hoped to see the genre “popularized” (dazhong hua 大衆化) so as to win mass appeal. Guo’s lyrical agenda, if treated with critical rigor, could have added a new dimension to Chinese lyrical poetics. However, Guo and his cohort were merely echoing the populist vein of revolutionary literature. By contrast, Ai Qing offered a different approach. As discussed above, he supported the social, if not socialist, potential of lyrical poetry for the sake of war, but he was wary that the poet might end up losing ground to populists and nationalists. The art of lyricism, as Ai Qing saw it, is carving out a space against the lure of both individual sentimentalism and collective fanaticism.
But the most noticeable critique came from Hu Feng, Mao’s archnemesis during the war. Hu regarded lyricism as the crucial affective and generic mode that facilitates the cause of war. For him, without lyrical bearing, “poets would have been unable to enact the agency of individual feeling and self-contestation”; as a result, poetry would have become either “empty cries” or “pale narrative.”109 Hu Feng was different from Guo Moruo, who equated lyricism with a romantic, populist call to arms, and from Ai Qing, who sought to create a voice between self-indulgence and propaganda. The lyrical mode Hu Feng aimed at neither serves any immediate political function nor seeks any subtle balance between selfhood and the collective cause. Rather, it is a process through which the poet comes to a tantalizing point where utopian personhood is promised and yet its realization is put on hold. The lyrical is therefore a mode “in the making,” instantiating the poet’s continued struggle, in language as in lived experience, to render the desire and frustration of his time. To that effect, Hu Feng lends a new dimension to his mentor Lu Xun’s Mara poet, who does not promise anything but to “pluck one’s heart.”
Hu Feng’s embrace of lyricism is not a surprise if judged by his earlier literary experience. As he confesses, although he was initiated into the world of poetry by Hu Shi’s Changshiji 嘗試集 (Collection of experiments, 1920) and Guo Moruo’s Goddess, “what made [him] really come close to literature as well as human life was two little-known booklets, Hupan shiji 湖畔詩集 (Lakeshore poems) and Wang Tongzhao’s 王統照 Yiye 一葉 (A leaf).” “The former gave me the feeling of a young man awakened by the May Fourth Movement to his ‘self’ … ; the latter … called forth my capacity to yearn and made me indescribably sad for a long time.”110 In 1925, Hu Feng met Lu Xun, at whose recommendation he read Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s The Symbol of Angst and later Alexander Blok’s “Twelve.” It was also at this time that he was introduced, most likely by Lu Xun, to Trotsky’s literary theory. Hu came to realize that revolutionary literature need not be reduced to an exercise of either reflectionism or formulism; instead, it could be an expression of the conflicting ethos of the time, a social “symbol of angst.” He had qualms, however, for Kuriyagawa was a follower of idealist philosophy and Freudianism, while Blok was a poet of the pre-Soviet revolutionary age. Hu nevertheless concluded that a poet ought to be faithful to his time; if reality drives him to speak in a “genuinely demonic voice,” in Lu Xun’s terminology, apart from that prescribed by the party line, he has no other choice.111
Hu Feng’s poetics culminated in his promotion of the “subjective fighting spirit” during the forties. He believed that literature should be created for the masses and that poetry in particular has to be popularized so as to be accessible to the audience at large. But instead of expressing revolutionary sentimentalism or grassroots utopianism, he stresses that poetry should guide its readers to explore the inner world of the insulted and the wounded, even at the cost of causing repugnance and pain. Such a poetics is “lyrical” because it describes the individual psyche—from ressentiment to neurosis—at its most vulnerable and obscure; it is revolutionary because it aims to arouse the political unconscious of the subaltern in fighting reality. Moreover, the “subjective fighting spirit” refers to the “life force” that drives the poet to remold ceaselessly the relations among feeling, language, and the world depicted. It prods the poet to confront, even inhabit, the “heart of darkness” of humanity so as to deliberate about the terms of emancipation. As a result, Hu Feng’s poetic subjectivity does not project any preordained telos but instead, the process of impulses and agendas in conflict.112 Hu Feng regarded his disciple Lu Ling as the best interpreter of his poetics. For him, Lu Ling’s Ji’e de Guo Sue 飢餓的郭素娥 (Hungry Guo Su’e, 1942) presents a woman suffering a “spiritual hunger, hunger for a profound liberation,”113 and the saga Children of the Rich is a “poem of the youth” (qingchun dishi 青春底詩).114
Hu Feng’s theory of “subjective fighting spirit” can be read as a subtle critique of Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks, which by the mid-forties had become party doctrine. Mao celebrated collective solidarity and the uplifting power of revolutionary poetics. Hu, by contrast, reminds us of the individual voices within the monolithic discourse, voices yet to be reconciled with either themselves or the idealized “people.” Where Mao is said to have aimed at the poetics of the sublime, Hu Feng appears more inclined to echo Trotsky’s declaration, “the new man cannot be formed without a new lyric poetry.”115 Perhaps with this in mind, Hu Feng indicates that though he is not a poet, he holds a strong “predilection for” and “conviction of” poetry.116 He describes a poet as one who “fights for human freedom and well-being, serves the multitude of lives in suffering, and has a heart of kindness and compassion,” and contends that only he “who achieves supremacy in life can achieve supremacy in poetry.” As such, “even if he has never written a single word, we want to call him a poet without any hesitation.”117 As for those who write good poems but fail to live a meaningful life, they are at best poets of “the secondary category” (dieryi de shiren 第二義的詩人).118
Insofar as Hu Feng believes that poetry can be “embodied” by a man’s deeds in life rather than mere language, he reiterates the traditional Chinese notion of reciprocity between personhood and poetic articulation.119 Still, he distinguishes his poetics by stressing the “subjective” and “fighting” elements of life as poetry or vice versa, foregrounding the kinetic process through which a man achieves his poetic magnitude. In this regard, his model is Lu Xun: “the life of Lu Xun is nothing but a piece of poetry.”120
THE MODERNISTS ALSO STROVE to redefine lyricism during the war. Instead of “feeling,” “experience” became the key term in their discourse. How a poet can address lived experience without losing his grip on nuanced affections was a subject for heated debate. In this, the modernists and their leftist counterparts are not all that irreconcilable. Three names, Feng Zhi, Mu Dan, and Yuan Kejia, stand out. In 1936, Feng returned to China after a six-year sojourn in Germany and wrote “Lierke—wei shizhounian erzuo” 里爾克——為十周年而作 (Rilke—in memory of the tenth anniversary of his passing away, 1936). This essay represents Feng’s farewell to his early lyrical penchant in the Romantic tradition. For Feng, Rilke “never indulges in narcissistic whims or aloof, circuitous symbols”; he “watches the multitude of things in the world with love and pure feeling,” and his poetry is a crystallized form of “experience” rather than mere emotions.
[This poet] watches rose petals, poppy blossoms, leopards, rhinoceros, swans, flamingoes, and black cats. He watches prisoners, women either sick or mature, prostitutes, lunatics, paupers, elderly women, and blind people. He watches mirrors, beautiful lace, women’s fate, and children’s life. He attends them with a humble heart, listening to their voice or silence, and shares their destiny that others ignore. All things around him look as if they have just been created by God. He completely removes his cultural clothes and watches them with primitive eyes.121
Echoing Rilke, Feng Zhi highlights the poet’s capacity to watch and listen, to embrace and be embraced by the world high and low, as well as his willingness to accept the mystery of the world with humility and receptivity. “People often say poetry needs inspiration, but Rilke says feeling is what we have long had. What we need is experience; such experience, like the Buddhists’ awakening, transforms itself into a multitude of things, all the bitterness and trouble of life.”122
Feng Zhi joined the exodus to the hinterland upon the outbreak of the war. The devastation and hardship of wartime life compelled him to ponder Rilke’s poetics in historical context. The result is a collection of twenty-seven sonnets titled Shisihang shi 十四行詩 (Sonnets, 1942). These poems inquire into a series of subjects: the cycle of life and death, the necessity of change, and the burden of making choices and commitments in life. Goethe’s desire for continued metamorphosis, Jaspers’ stress on human existentiality and responsibility, and Rilke’s deliberations on “solitude” and “connectedness” are rethought against the Chinese landscape torn apart by the war.123
Granting his indebtedness to Western poets, Feng Zhi saves his deepest respect for Du Fu. Feng had admired the “Sage of Chinese Poetry” since his formative years, but did not come to a fuller understanding of the master’s vision until the war. Feng Zhi had quoted Du Fu’s line “Standing alone in desolation, I sing poems all by myself” (duli cangmang ziyongshi 獨立蒼茫自詠詩)124 as the epigraph of his collection Beiyou 北游 (Northern journey, 1929). It nevertheless took him more than a decade to truly engage in both the historical pathos and the lyrical desolation expressed by Du’s Fu’s “standing alone” and “reciting poems”; interestingly, he did so by taking up the form of Rilkean sonnets. His imaginary dialogue with Du Fu marks a most fascinating moment of Sonnets. Meanwhile, Feng Zhi committed himself to a critical biography of the great shishi or “poet-historian,” a project he did not finish till the early 1950s.125
Both Mu Dan and Yuan Kejia were Feng Zhi’s students at Southwest Associated University during the war. They belong to the “Nine Leaves” (jiuye 九葉) school (a term coined in the 1980s to refer to nine young modernist poets who arose during this time). Arguably the most talented and controversial of the nine, Mu Dan started to write poems as early as 1935, when he was still a student at Tsing-hua University, and he became familiar with Beijing modernism and the criticism of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and his own mentor, William Empson (1906–1984). At first reading, Mu Dan may not sound like a lyrical poet of any conventional kind; his lines are punctuated by agitated rhythm, his subjects range from jungle battles to chancy rendezvous, and his tone mixes both cynicism and wit. As his fellow poet Tang Shi 唐湜 (1920–2005) commented, Mu Dan’s “lyricism may appear weak in imagistic terms, but it has its own style: a kind of toned-down lyricism, which retains the metaphorical charm of symbolism while never short of subterranean, volcanic lava-like passion.”126
Mu Dan’s attempt to redefine lyricism is also demonstrated in his dialogue with contemporary poets. In his comment on the changed style of Bian Zhilin’s wartime poems, he proposes a “new lyricism … that encourages people to rationally seek for things bright.”127 The keyword here is “rationally.” As Mu Dan claims, “our poetry is inundated by passion, finding no anchoring force anywhere in the depth of reason, as if prompted only by the poets’ hysteria.”128 Here he sounds like Xu Chi, who proposes to “exile lyricism.” Instead, however, Mu Dan recommends reinforcing lyricism by injecting “reason” and “distance” into feeling. While reason enables the poet to reflect on emotional complexity, distance helps reorient his sense of perspective, thus bringing into view what conventional lyricism fails to reach—the domain of quotidian experiences and sensuous faculties.129 Thus, with “new lyricism” (xinde shuqing 新的抒情), Mu Dan hopes to bring the wholesome, sensuous experience of Chinese people into poetry. For Mu Dan, Ai Qing is an exemplary practitioner of “new lyricism.”130
What concerns us here is the way Mu Dan brings the “new lyricism” to inscribe history. Take “Senlin zhimei” 森林之魅 (The phantom in the forest, 1945) as an example. The poem is based on Mu Dan’s personal experience as a volunteer student soldier in the Chinese Expeditionary Force that fought the Japanese in Burma in 1942. Instead of describing the horror and grave loss of the battle, Mu Dan presents an encounter between the spirits of the forest and a human being. Through their dialogue, the violence of the war and its consequences are reenacted, and the exchange ends with a ritual-like elegiac call to the ghosts forever lost in the jungle:
Under the shadowy trees, along the bank of the torrential river,
June and July are dead, amid the unpopulated mountains.
Your bodies are still struggling to return,
and yet nameless flowers already bloom atop your head. …
No one knows history has passed by here,
leaving behind heroic souls to grow in the trunks of trees.131
在陰暗的樹下，在急流的水邊，
逝去的六月和七月，在無人的山間，
你們的身體還挣扎着想要回返，
而無名的野花已在頭上開满…
没有人知道歷史曾在此走過，
留下了英靈化入樹幹而滋生。
To describe the conflation of history and feeling in Mu Dan’s poems, Chen Taisheng refers to the classical Chinese dialogic between “sentiment” and “scene.” If a popular poet such as He Qifang starts his lyrical composition by first calling on feeling, then associating feeling and a certain scene, Mu Dan takes the opposite direction: he starts with a scene—occasioned by an event, and action—and then proceeds to conjure up its emotional potential. Chen describes Mu Dan’s lyricism as oriented to “event” (shijianhua shuqing 事件化抒情), in contrast with the conventional lyricism, which is allegedly oriented to “imagery” (yixianghua shuqing 意象化抒情).132 Thus Chen highlights the way Mu Dan imbues his lyrical lines with a dynamism caused by an “event,” either lived experience or a dramatized representation of it. Chen’s observation is based on Mu Dan’s indebtedness to Eliot, Spender, and Auden; it nevertheless recapitulates the double meaning of the etymological root of the Chinese notion of shuqing as an expression of feeling and inscription of circumstances/factuality.
Mu Dan’s “new lyricism” takes us to Yuan Kejia’s “dramatic lyricism.” Among the Nine Leaves poets, Yuan stands out with his critical rigor and polemical thrust; thanks to his appreciation of Mu Dan’s poems, he was able to form a theoretical discourse based on the latter’s works. For Yuan, Chinese lyricism during the war and after was plagued by unrestrained sentimentalism and political agendas. Yuan’s diagnosis is nothing new; what is interesting is his remedy. He suggests that Chinese poetry needs “dramatization,”133 by which he means at least three things. First, Chinese poets and their poetic personae are more often than not obsessed with expressing selfhood, so much so as to fall prey to narcissism. To modulate one’s feelings, “depersonalization,” in the sense of role-playing, becomes the first requisite. Second, with the skill of dramatization, a poet is supposed to “make a scene” of that which otherwise eludes one’s perceptive and cognitive capacities. This involves not only a refreshed interaction with the world but also an inventive verse form. Third, through calling forth the drama inherent in lyricism, the poet lays bare the unstable grounding of modern poetry in both historical and ontological terms.134
Yuan Kejia’s criticism reflects his eclectic approach to the concepts as proposed by Richards, Brooks, Kenneth Burke, and R. P. Blackmur, and his discourse is full of idioms such as paradox, irony, dramatic conflict, and ambiguity. His “dramatic lyricism” represents a completion of the wartime modernists’ poetic pursuit. By invoking drama as the foundation of lyricism, Yuan tries to capture the instantaneous sparks arising from the poet’s encounter with everyday experience, its tension and consequent resolution. Meanwhile, he also reminds us of the performative function of lyrical utterance, which can be related to both representational agency and public-oriented communication. Yuan finds here a link between lyricism and civic commitment. Because he considers lyricism not merely a linguistic end in itself but a dramatized form of communication, he is able to do away with the closure of the “well-wrought urn” and discuss topics such as “poetry and democracy” and “‘literature of the person’ versus ‘literature of the people.’”135 He demonstrates through close reading that the modernist poetry by Mu Dan and other Nine Leaves poets is just as relevant to reality as some other, more direct expressions of political sentiments.
OUR INVESTIGATION HAS TO take into account cases such as Zhou Zuoren and Hu Lancheng. Both were known for an elegant style and independent worldview, and both chose to collaborate with the Japanese during the war. Intriguingly, both declared that they had betrayed their nation for the sake of safeguarding Chinese (lyrical) culture. Of the two, Zhou Zuoren has long been revered as a forerunner of the May Fourth Movement and a champion of lyrical sensibility and individual integrity. After the war broke out, however, Zhou surprised his compatriots by refusing to leave occupied Peking, citing the reason as attempting to protect the cultural and intellectual heritage of the ancient city from ruination. He quickly became a collaborator with the puppet regime.
Zhou’s treason has inspired much guesswork, but he remained silent about it throughout the rest of his life. For our concern, if “genuineness” remains his sine qua non, his action reveals an unexpected gap of ambiguity in his lyrical politics. Zhou had always tried to cultivate his lyrical vision in terms of both cosmopolitanism and localism. As time moved on, he became increasingly convinced that his vision could be implemented under the aegis of not the Nationalist regime but the Japanese imperialist power. Therefore, he deemed his collaboration with Japan not a betrayal of but a commitment to a lyrical China of his own. Zhou insisted that he had been true to himself in making his decision, but he turned his back to the fatal irony that the power that claimed it would resuscitate Chinese civilization was also the one that ruined Chinese reality. Judging by his conciliatory manners and tortuous rhetoric during the war, Zhou could not have been unaware of the incongruity between his lyrical vision and his political choice.136
Hu Lancheng is an even more radical case, not only because he ventured to aggrandize his collaboration by means of a neat lyrical theory but also because he managed to dramatize the theory even at a personal, romantic level. Hu yearned for a golden time prior to that of the Classic of Poetry. He believed that only through the assistance of Japan, the “true” preserver of premodern Chinese civilization, could Chinese civilization be granted a chance to renew itself. Hu claimed that the genesis of modernity was motivated by qing/feeling.137 Thanks to its inchoate and amorphous nature, feeling is said to be above discipline or ideology, calling forth a rhythm of life naturally in tune with time. Feeling “is neither sense nor temperament; it is life in itself.”138 Hu Lancheng sympathizes with Lu Xun’s revolutionary bearing but regrets that the master is beset by a “deep gloom,” which makes him “miserable and desperate.”139 Knowing how to modulate feeling so as to elicit its “greatness and beauty” is the prerequisite for a revolutionary. For Hu, the creative urge of revolution lies in the poetics of xing.
Zhou Zuoren’s and Hu Lancheng’s concepts prod us to contemplate an unlikely lyricism, the lyricism of betrayal. By this I refer not merely to the fact that Zhou, Hu, and their likes disavow allegiance to any political or personal oath but also to the way they make such a disavowal the pretext for their poetic expression. At their most exuberant, they manage to distract, even disengage, their implied readers from any hostile preconceptions. But their idiosyncratic stance may prove no more than a slippery alibi for opportunism. By mastering a language full of personal charms, Zhou and Hu posit a dilemma: they either bring the power of the lyrical to the full, ushering readers into the unsolicited state of intersubjectivity, or merely reveal the inherent performative, hence duplicitous, nature of lyrical writing.
Meanwhile, their cases bring into view an obscure aspect of traditional Chinese poetics. If lyricism is that which best renders one’s innermost and sincere feeling, can it be taken to facilitate a literature that arouses equivocal responses? If lyricism enacts the reciprocal ties among poetic intent, textual manifestation, and circumstantial experience, how much shuttling should we tolerate?140 These questions become all the more ambiguous considering that, throughout their lives, neither Zhou Zuoren nor Hu Lancheng ever conceded to the charge of treason. Zhou responded with defiant reticence; Hu lured his sympathizers and detractors into a vertiginous rhetorical extravaganza. Did they betray lyricism, or did they demonstrate a lyricism hitherto unthinkable in the classical context, a lyricism of betrayal?
The Lyre, the Bugle, and the Phonograph
All of the above provocations, debates, and repercussions regarding modern Chinese lyricism and lyricality came to a tentative halt when the People’s Republic of China was founded. This was no doubt an “epic” era that witnessed the grandeur of nation building. But as critics and writers have pointed out, it was also a “lyrical era.”141 The rebirth of the nation gave rise to a new sense of subjectivity: liberated from the shackles of the old society, aspiring, dynamic, full of expressive desire in both political and personal spheres. It also marked the reorientation of temporality, as best illustrated by the title of Hu Feng’s narrative poem “Shijian kaishile” 時間開始了 (Time has begun, 1949). For the first time in decades, Chinese people were said to have felt the urge to “Sing Out Loud” (Fangsheng gechang 放聲歌唱, 1956), as the title of He Jingzhi’s 賀敬之 (1924–) famous poem suggests. The content and format of this new lyricism and lyrical subjectivity, however, were subject to scrutiny. Yuan Shuipai 袁水拍 (1916–1982) describes in Shixuan 詩選 (Poetry selection), the first poetry anthology published in the new regime:
The poet should be neither an invisible person nor a spectator, nor a hypocrite! The poet can only be a revolutionary, a communist fighter, a selfless person as described by Comrade Mao, a noble person, a pure person, a moral person, a person with good taste, and a person who is good for the people.142
Likewise, He Jingzhi contends that the poet has to be “a collectivist” portraying “collective heroism”; that “poetics has to be united with politics; the poet has to be united with the warrior.”143
As far as the politics of lyricism is concerned, two factors merit attention. In 1957, the inaugural issue of Shikan 詩刊 (Poetry), the first official poetry magazine of New China, featured eighteen classical-style poems composed by Mao Zedong and ignited a national craze for reading the great leader’s masterpieces.144 Meanwhile, a national New Folksong Movement (xinminge yundong 新民歌運動) was launched;145 its goal was to solicit spontaneous voices from the people à la the model of the Classic of Poetry, allegedly in a collection of folksongs. Mao declared in 1958 that folksong and classical-style poetry constituted “the two foundations of Chinese new poetry.” This statement is oxymoronic because in the name of “new poetry,” it features two types of verse that are nothing new if judged by their generic attributes; meanwhile, the output of Chinese modern poetry from 1919 to 1949, for all its formal innovations and thematic breakthroughs, is relegated to a dated practice. Of the two poetic “foundations,” Mao opted to promote the folksong despite favoring classical-style poetry; he believed that “the future form of new poetry should be derived from the folksong and the content of new poetry should be the unification of the dialectic between realism and romanticism.”146 Hence Zhou Yang’s famous essay stating that the “new folksong creates the new path of poetry,” and the campaign for the “unification” of “revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism.”147
However artificial and hegemonic, the New Folksong Movement and the unification campaign flaunted Mao’s yearning to lyricize China—in his way. The goal was to have the Chinese people sing out loud collectively their genuine, personal happiness and hope in the new era. In Průšek’s terminology, the lyrical is epic and the epic is lyrical. The movement culminated in 1959, the tenth anniversary of the founding of New China. Thousands of “red ballads” are said to have been composed by the people spontaneously to celebrate socialist life, while the way the poems were compiled reminds one of caifeng 採風—the imperial collection of folksongs in order to poll the consensus—in ancient times. Former modernist poets such as Feng Zhi joined the campaign too, proclaiming that “the poet should be a eulogizer of the present, and a prophet of the future.”148 But it is Xu Chi who best captures the tenor of the time: “the passionate outpouring of political lyrical poetry (zhengzhi shuqingshi 政治抒情詩) is our new form of poetry: political lyrical poetry that conveys the most fresh and abundant feeling of the people. Although it is still a lyrical expression of the individual, this individual is a citizen who is fully in tune with the spirit of the nation and the people as a whole.”149 Xu Chi, it will be recalled, proposed to “exile lyricism” in 1939.
The literary historian Hong Zicheng points out that “political lyrical poetry” derives its power from two sources: “the romantic inclination of modern Chinese poetry … and the legacy of Western Romanticism since the nineteenth century, particularly in the vein of Soviet revolutionary poets.”150 Hong’s observation is accurate, but based on the lyrical tradition this chapter has referred to, one may ask whether political lyrical poetry has a Chinese origin. Xu Chi provides his answer:
In the ancient times, we also had odes. Liu Xie puts it nicely: “Ode means to celebrate; with the ode, one beautifies the splendid virtue [of the prince] and celebrates its magnanimity.” But Liu also says, “The ode is the form through which one communicates with the Divine” … this is different from the ode today, which is [meant] to sing for the people, the socialist projects, and peace and friendship. Qu Yuan’s “Jusong” 橘頌 (Ode of orange) is indeed emotionally affective, but it is only an ode for a refined virtue and character. Times have changed. The subjects and content of poets singing the ode are very different.151
With the nomination of the “Socialist Ode,” Xu Chi and likeminded poets completed their tortuous search for the authentic form of modern Chinese lyric. Jubilant in tone and celebratory in content, Xu Chi’s own “Zuguosong” 祖國頌 (Ode to my mother country, 1959) best demonstrates the lyricism he espoused.
Thus, in contrast with the conventional wisdom that the new Chinese Socialist regime oversaw the transition of the modern Chinese poetic discourse from the lyrical to the epic, lyricism, as a genre, a discourse, or a form of cultural politics became only more contentious in the fifties. This fact requires us to rethink not only the turbulent undercurrents of the seemingly monological tendency of the time but also the contested connotations of qing and shuqing ever ingrained in Chinese poetics. Wavering between the pulls of affective authenticity and historical circumstance, ethical immanence and political instrumentalism, the Chinese lyrical has undergone multiple deliberations and transformations through history; the Maoist time adds yet another dimension to its modern responses.
But discordant voices are heard from other sources. In 1957, when Poetry was inaugurated in Beijing, featuring a team of poets headed by Chairman Mao, there appeared in Chengdu a poetry magazine, Xingxing 星星 (Stars), that suggested:
Poetry is always meant to be lyrical. There is no epic that is not lyrical, there is no narrative poetry that is not lyrical, there is no landscape poetry that is not lyrical, there is no philosophy poetry that is not lyrical.
China has a population of more than six hundred million. The feeling of these six hundred million people is an immense sea with no end. It is bizarre if someone should say that poetry shows its limitations if it “expresses people’s feeling.” It could only be concluded as a strange fixation if someone favors only a “monolithic voice,” and allows only one kind of feeling to be expressed.152
An announcement like this became an uncanny echo to Shen Congwen’s private call for “a history with feeling” a few years before. But as the grand narrative went, this was no time for any lyrical expression other than the prescribed formula. By then, Hu Feng had been purged for his recalcitrant agenda against the party. Zhu Guangqian was in the middle of overhauling his aesthetics in deference to Marxism, though he could not help betraying a residual attachment to his subjectivism. Feng Zhi had converted himself from a believer in Rilke and Goethe to a believer in Chairman Mao. Zhou Zuoren was lying low, capitalizing on writings about his brother Lu Xun, from whom he was estranged as early as 1923; Hu Lancheng had found shelter in Japan while churning out more and more elegant words about his political and romantic betrayals.
Still, this was a time dominated by what Guo Moruo and fellow leftists such as Qu Qiubai had once proclaimed, that a poet should function like a phonograph broadcasting the mandate of revolution. Meanwhile, Ai Qing, once the loudest trumpeter for political lyricism, found himself a counterrevolutionary to be exiled in Xinjiang. The prediction of his early poem, “the fate of the bugler is always sad and bitter,” came true.153
This was also the time when Chen Shih-hsiang was conceiving of his treatise of the Chinese “lyrical tradition,” Průšek was developing his theory of the “lyrical and the epic,” and Shen Congwen was seeking a form other than literature to inscribe his “abstract lyricism.”