Where history collapses, poetry arises.
Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.
THIS BOOK AIMS TO DISCUSS the dialogic of lyricism and Chinese literary and artistic modernity during the mid-twentieth century. The term “lyricism” is used here to refer not only to a mode of poetry, the lyric,3 but also to a spectrum of articulations—ranging from narrative to film, from painting to calligraphy—whose formal inputs and affective outcomes are attributable to the “lyrical” effect. Above all, lyricism is invoked to describe a set of concepts, discourses, or values regarding the poetics of selfhood;4 it is made intelligible through sensory and imagistic data in such a way as to inform the intellectual and literary culture of a historical moment.
The English term “lyricism” or “lyrical,” however, may not fully explain what I would like to address in the Chinese context—shuqing or 抒情. Lyricism and shuqing share common ground, pointing to an intense personal quality expressive of feeling or emotion, an engagement with temporal caesura and self-reflexivity, or an exuberant manifestation of subjectivity in an art form such as music or poetry.5 But this serves only as an entry point to the critical trajectories of both. Shuqing is an old but not necessarily the most conspicuous concept in Chinese literary and cultural discourse; its etymological roots and its epistemological bearings comprise a genealogy far richer than we know about in modern times.6 Shuqing took on a new dimension during the May Fourth era, when it was cited as an equivalent to Western lyricism, defined in the vein of romanticism and revolutionism.7 How one generation of Chinese intellectuals, literati, and artists negotiated the multiple strains of shuqing and lyricism and brought forth a unique discourse of the Chinese modern is the focus of this study.
I have chosen a specific historical moment—China in the mid-twentieth century—that is often not associated with lyrical representations. The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Civil War (1947–1949), the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949), the exodus of millions of Chinese overseas in the aftermath of the “Great Divide,” and the incessant political campaigns in New China, culminating in the Great Cultural Revolution (1966), brought drastic changes to Chinese lives and mentalities. The magnitude and consequences of these changes were such that even a mere invocation of “the lyrical” would have sounded irrelevant or irreverent. As many would have it, mid-twentieth-century China was instead an era that witnessed History in the making, a time that should be described as “epic.”8
This is where my inquiry into lyricism and Chinese modernity starts. I contend that precisely because the mid-twentieth century was characterized by national cataclysms and mass movements, this period helps bring into sight the polemic of Chinese lyricism at its most intense. Common wisdom has it that lyricism is a rhapsodic flight from time and temporality, an indulgence in personal feelings, or in the leftist jargon, a petit bourgeois gesture in resistance to social engagement. However, a quick review of the term in either Chinese or Western tradition will already teach us something different. Whereas lyricism in Western literature was not taken as a token of solipsism until a rather late stage of its development,9 shuqing, as a core concept of the Chinese poetics of qing 情 (feeling), has always indicated an interaction between the self and the world and beyond.10 Moreover, the Western Romantic brand of lyricism was closely related to the revolutionary upheaval of late-eighteenth-century Europe,11 and the Chinese expression of shuqing is traceable as far back as the polemical provocations of the Songs of the South. When Lu Xun claimed in 1926 that his writing was nothing but shifen shuqing 釋憤抒情 (to unleash wrath and express feelings), he was echoing the famous lines attributed to Qu Yuan that poetry was meant to fafen yi shuqing 發憤以抒情 (to vent wrath and express feelings), written more than two thousand years before.12
As will be discussed in the following chapters, despite the increasingly strident call to arms, the mid-twentieth century saw waves of literary and artistic practices that sought to identify individual options in the face of collective objectives and construe affective visions amid human atrocities. These practices demonstrate a complex of impulses and expressions that cast extant definitions of lyricism into question. For instance, on the eve of the founding of New China, when Shen Congwen, the leading voice of Chinese lyrical nativism, attempted suicide in order to safeguard a pure form of life he wished to espouse, Feng Zhi 馮至 (1905–1993), “the best lyricist in modern China,” in Lu Xun’s opinion,13 found it impossible to sustain his poetic conviction without pledging allegiance to the leftist Muse. At the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, whereas the film director Fei Mu 費穆 (1906–1951) projected onto the screen an aesthetics of feeling and fidelity inspired by the Confucian agenda of li 禮 (ritual) and yue 樂 (music),14 Hu Lancheng, a literatus cum collaborator, found in the same Confucian agenda a pretext for his politics and erotics of betrayal.15
To rediscover the lyrical at this epic moment, accordingly, means more than reiterating the conventional dichotomy of authentic interiority versus formal exteriority, aesthetic indulgence versus revolutionary engagement, or indigenous articulation versus Western Romantic calling. Rather, I have in mind a configuration of soundings that reverberate with one another in rendering the tenor of the time. Through a series of case studies, I argue that if selfhood appears to be a keyword to the writers and artists discussed, it represents a construct overdetermined by both individual and collective motivations, and that wherever shuqing is invoked, it is informed by both modern and premodern references. In particular, in cases where feeling generates its own disavowal or lyricality begets irony, I contemplate these embedded contentions against the historical backdrop. Studying this period brings to mind two of the greatest “lyrical moments” in premodern China, the Six Dynasties and the Late Ming,16 which arose respectively in the midst of sociopolitical chaos and axiological shakeups.
Despite ongoing national crises in the mid-twentieth century, there was a steady flow of lyrical discourses. It started with Ai Qing’s Shilun 詩論 (Treatise on poetry, 1941) and Zhu Guangqian’s Shilun 詩論 (Treatise on poetry, 1942), in which lyricism is treated from either a formalist or a revolutionary perspective; it culminated in Chen Shih-hsiang’s proclamation in “On Chinese Lyrical Tradition” in 1971 that Chinese literature as a whole is characterized by nothing but a “lyrical tradition.” In between came a wide range of undertakings, including at least Li Guangtian’s 李廣田 (1906–1968) Shide yishu 詩的藝術 (The art of poetry, 1943), Zang Kejia’s 臧克家 (1905–2004) Wode shishenghuo 我的詩生活 (My poetic life, 1943), Feng Wenbing’s 馮文炳 (Fei Ming 廢名, 1901–1967) Tan xinshi 談新詩 (On new poetry, 1944), Zhu Ziqing’s 朱自清 (1898–1948) Xinshi zahua 新詩雜話 (Random talks on new poetry, 1947), Zong Baihua’s Yijing 藝境 (The vista of art, 1948),17 Ah Long’s 阿壠 (1907–1967) Ren he shi 人和詩 (The human and poetry, 1949), Hu Feng’s essays on poetry and subjectivity, and Shen Congwen’s various writings in the 1940s and ’50s.
Lyrical criticism gained a robust momentum overseas in the aftermath of the 1949 national divide. In Hong Kong, Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909–1978) rethought his Neo-Confucian project in a “tender, lyrical mentality” during the fifties, and is described as a thinker writing in a poet’s style.18 In Taiwan, Xu Fuguan 徐復觀 (1904–1982) published Zhongguo yishu jingshen 中國藝術精神 (The spirit of Chinese art, 1965), ruminating on the philosophical foundations of Chinese painting, calligraphy, poetry, and art criticism.19 In Japan, Hu Lancheng finished his Shanhe suiyue 山河歲月 (China through time, 1954) and Jinsheng jinshi 今生今世 (This life, this time, 1959), reassessing Chinese history and personal life respectively with recourse to the wisdom of the Classic of Poetry, Zen Buddhism, Daoism, and the I-Jing. In the United States, Mei Tsu-lin 梅祖麟 and Kao Yu-kung 高友工 launched in 1968 a survey of the lyrical “effect” of Chinese poetry in terms of structuralism and analytical linguistics.20 In the next decade, Kao Yu-kung proffered “lyrical aesthetics” (shuqing meidian 抒情美典) as that which constitutes Chinese culture at its most exquisite.21
These critics shared little ideological ground and were geographically far apart both before and after the 1949 divide. Nevertheless, they appear to be in unison when they call for lyricism as a way to help make sense of history and literature. This raises the question how they invoke—indeed, invent—the lyrical in response to the epic time, and how such a lyrical invocation can be understood against the broader backdrop of the mid-century crisis on a global scale. For this reason, I highlight in the rest of this chapter three figures: Chen Shih-hsiang, Shen Congwen, and Jaroslav Průšek. Chen Shih-hsiang left China in 1941 and became a professor of Chinese literature at the University of California at Berkeley in the late ’40s. A modernist by training, Chen nevertheless took greater interest in premodern Chinese literature after arriving in the States, to the point where he campaigned for the “Chinese lyrical tradition.” Shen Congwen was the most accomplished lyrical nativist before 1949, only to be thrown into eclipse for political reasons in the new regime. But he found a new commitment in art history as well as private forms of writings such as letters, jottings, and classical-style poems. These efforts led him to formulate “abstract lyricism” in the heyday of socialist realism. Finally, I move beyond the Chinese and Sinophone worlds by reassessing the contribution of Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980). A renowned Czech Sinologist and an aspiring Marxist, Průšek promoted an “epic” vision of the Chinese Communist Revolution and Cold War politics. Paradoxically, along the way he identified the “lyrical”—informed by classical Chinese poetic culture—as that which ultimately manifests Chinese revolutionary modernity. To facilitate my discussion of these three figures, a brief overview of the traditional discourse of shuqing is in order.
From Shuqing to the Lyrical: A Critical Genealogy
The Chinese expression of shuqing was first seen in the Songs of the South. In “Xisong” 惜誦 (Grieving I make my plaint),
Cherishing my plaint, I give sorrows free rein,
Venting rancor, I tell of pent-up feelings/thoughts.22
惜誦以致愍兮，
發憤以抒情。
the poet seeks a way to express his “wrath” as his loyalty to his prince is ignored and his advice rejected. The political context serves as the foundation for understanding the ancient poet’s need to release his feeling. In a poem lamenting his own fate by remembering Qu Yuan, “Ai shiming” 哀時命 (Alas that my lot was not cast), the Han court poet Zhuang Ji 莊忌 (188?–105? B.C.) sighs:
Alone and ill at ease and full of bitterness:
How can I vent my anger and give my thoughts expression?23
獨便悁而煩毒兮，
焉發憤而抒情。
This prompts rethinking the shu of shuqing. The Chinese character shu 抒 is etymologically related to 紓 (unravel) or 舒 (release, relieve). It has also been suggested that shu could refer to a process of “easing” and “dissipating” feeling, to the extent of doing away with it.24 On the other hand, shu can be cross-referenced to zhu 杼, which refers to both the control device of a water container25 and the loom of a weaving machine.26 Whereas in the former context shu/zhu indicates a way to modulate the waterlike qing, in the latter context it indicates a way to organize—weave—the multiple threads of qing. Thus Zhuang Ji uses zhuzhongqing 杼中情 in the following lines:
My mind is full of resentment that finds no outlet.
Only in these verses can I [weave] my feelings.27
志憾恨而不逞兮，
杼中情而屬詩。
Etymological research indicates that qing has been a fairly unstable concept throughout premodern history. The term is not found in the oracle bones or other ancient inscriptions, and it is referred to only once in the Classic of Poetry and twice in the Lunyu 論語 (The Analects).28 Qing becomes a frequently cited word in the Zuozhuan 左傳 and other texts of the Warring States period, mostly referring to actual circumstances or consensual judgment.29 Scholars have noted that, starting in pre-Han times, qing was described as an amorphous force impelled by sensory and mental faculties.30 As the Liji 禮記 (Book of rites) observes, “What is meant by human qing? Pleasure, anger, sadness, fear, love, hate, and desire. These seven, men are capable of without having learned them.”31 Xunzi 荀子 juxtaposes qing and yu 欲 (desire) in terms of xing 性 (one’s inborn nature), contending that “One’s inborn nature is the consequence of Heaven; qing is the substance of nature; yu is the response to qing.”32 Qing took on a more ambiguous moral dimension in the Western Han dynasty, when Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 179–104 B.C.) allegedly set up the antithesis between xing and qing. Whereas xing is associated with the inborn nature of the good, qing is considered to be the part of humanity susceptible to temptations.33 The following centuries saw a continuum of exegeses, debates, and deliberations regarding the nature of qing. It ranged from the Wei-Jin intellectuals’ valorization of qing as that which preconditions humanity to Song Neo-Confucians’ recommendation of li 理 (reason) over qing, which is compared to flowing water;34 from the late Ming literati’s call for individual emancipation in the name of the cult of qing (qingjiao 情教)35 to the late Qing reformers’ promotion of qing as the key to renewing Chinese citizenry.36
The excavation of the Guodian Chu Bamboo Slips (Guodian chujian 郭店楚簡) in the late twentieth century has contributed an additional dimension to the exegesis of qing. In the segment “Xingzi mingchu” 性自命出 (Disposition arises from the Mandate), the character qing appears as many as nineteen times; particularly, the statement dao shiyu qing 道始於情 (The Way originates with feeling/circumstance) has induced various interpretations.37 Scholars have argued that the statement greatly modifies the conventional (Confucian) wisdom that qing is something to be rectified by cultural institutions; instead, qing serves as the originary substance of those institutions. As such, qing facilitates the Way and imbues humanity with aesthetic sensibilities.38
Besides denoting emotional faculties, qing has been referred to as “a state or situation as it is or happens” (shiqing 實情), related to meanings such as the factual and the real.39 By extension, qing has also been associated with the authentic and the truthful.40 A. C. Graham points out that in the pre-Han texts, qing as a noun means “facts,” and as an adjective, “genuine” or “essential.”41 Chad Hansen critiques the essentialist tendency of Graham’s argument, stressing instead that qing occurs where external reality and internal response converge. Hence qing is that which contains both “passions” and “facts.”42 Anthony Yu disagrees with Graham’s essentialist approach and Hanson’s realist approach, instead calling attention to the capacity of subjectivity to modulate the facts and passions. To that end, Yu revisits the notion of Xunzi (as quoted above) and argues for the continued negotiation of xing, qing, and yu.43
The interaction between qing as “sentiment/feeling” and qing as “facts/circumstances” has led scholars to further investigate whether qing is an innate resource arising from human interiority or an omnipresent entity enacted by, and constituent of, natural and cosmic movements. Gong Pengcheng 龔鵬程, for instance, questions the concept of qing as a result only of internal expressivity. He refers instead to the belief in the Han dynasty and earlier that qing emanates from a circulation of material forces in the universe.44 In his recent study, Ling-hon Lam debates the genesis of qing as an affective outburst in terms of “exteriority.” By associating qing with the trope feng 風 (wind, air) instead of the more conventional xing 興 (evocation or creation of feeling), Lam argues that the interiority of qing always presupposes the construct of exteriority as both an ontological condition and a historical grounding. With cases drawn from the Ming theater and other genres, he seeks to define the “spatiality” of qing, ranging from textual and material artifacts to theatrical action, which helps “perform” the subjectivity and inner awareness.45
In literature, qing appeared in “Shi daxu” 詩大序 (Great preface to the Classic of Poetry), the most famous statement of Chinese poetics:
The poem is that to which what is intently on the mind goes. In the mind, it is being “intent” [zhi 志]; coming out in language, it is a poem. The sentiments [qing 情] are stirred within and take on form in words. If words alone are inadequate, we speak them out in sighs. If sighing is inadequate, we sing them. If singing them is inadequate, unconsciously our hands dance them and our feet tap them.46
Although “poetry expresses what is intended in the mind” (shiyanzhi 詩言志) has ever been celebrated as the foundational concept of Chinese poetry, critics have pointed out that zhi and qing are not contradicting but complementary motivations.47 In Pauline Yu’s words, the “Preface” can assume “what is internal (emotion) will naturally find some externally correlative form or action, and that poetry can spontaneously reflect, affect, and effect political and cosmic order.”48
Qing became a keyword for literary undertakings first in the Wei-Jin period. As opposed to “poetry expresses what is intended in the mind,” Lu Ji 陸機 (261–303) redefined poetry as that which “follows from qing” (shiyuanqing 詩緣情), thus inaugurating the lyrical tradition of Chinese poetics.49 While stressing sentiment and its expressive conduit, Lu’s conception of qing carries the double meaning of qing as zhi or vice versa.50 Moreover, he is mindful of the reciprocal circumstances of the internal and the external in the poetic expression of qing. In his translation of Lu Ji’s Wenfu 文賦 (Essay on literature), Stephen Owen renders the character qing in the context “meizi zhuwen, youjian qiqing” 每自屬文，尤見其情 as both the “state of mind” and the “situation”: “And whenever I myself compose a literary piece, I perceive full well ‘their state of mind (or the situation).’”51 The poetic “mind,” the “situation” under treatment, and their manifestation do not contradict but interact with each other. Lu Ji describes the poet’s expressive capacity in terms of zhu or a weaving device “working with ssu [si 絲] ‘threads’ or ssu [si 思] ‘thoughts’.”
Even if the shuttle and loom were in my own feelings,
I must dread lest other have preceded me.52
雖杼軸於予懷，
怵他人之我先。
Playing up the metaphor of the loom with which to weave (the fabric of) feeling, Lu Ji brings to mind the bifurcated faculty inherent in the invocation of shuqing in “Jiuzhang,” relieving and preserving, unraveling and fabricating.
This, however, does not mean that shuqing enjoyed a smooth generic and conceptual reappraisal in the following centuries. Zhu Ziqing, for example, contended in 1947 that “before Wang Guowei’s time, orthodox Chinese literati rarely used [the expression shuqing],”53 “as a lexicon shuqing has a traditional heritage, but the meaning of shuqing as we understand it today comes from foreign sources.”54 Zhu has a point in light of modern Chinese writers’ and artists’ appropriation of shuqing as an equivalent to the Western Romantic vein of lyricism. But he overlooks the fact that Chinese moderns have never jettisoned their own heritage altogether. On the contrary, precisely because of the complexities resulting from the transcultural circulation of its Chinese and Western, modern and traditional sources, shuqing carries even more connotations in modern times.
Recent studies indicate that shuqing was undertaken by “orthodox Chinese literati” in premodern times in a multitude of ways. Leonard Chan (Chan Kwok-Kou) 陳國球 points out that, in the wake of the Songs of the South, references to and the exercise of shuqing are found in a wide range of articulations, from Ban Gu’s 班固 (32–92) “Liangdu fu” 兩都賦 (Rhapsody of two capitals) to Jiang Yan’s 江淹 (444–505) poems and Xiao Tong’s 蕭統 (501–531) Zhaoming wenxuan 昭明文選 (Selections of literature, 520).55 As Chan and other scholars such as Cheng Yu-yu 鄭毓瑜 note, besides being associated with affection and selfhood, shuqing took on multiple social dimensions, as pedagogical methodology, social interlocution, and even therapeutic treatment, in the early and medieval periods.56 Moreover, shuqing is often taken to motivate satiric analogy (fengyu 諷喻) or “setting forth the full glory of great virtue” (xingrong shengde 形容盛德), namely, political encomium.57 In Tang and Song poetic cultures, it served broadly as a trope of both solitary musing and social exchange, thus demonstrating both the self-reflective and the performative capacity of feeling.58
In resonance with the double meaning of qing as arising from the inner self as well as factual circumstances, shuqing is related to a subjectivity’s engagement with both sentiment and shi 事 (event). As such, the phrase may be extrapolated in terms of a poetic cum historical implication, best illustrated by the tradition of shishi 詩史 (poet-historian/poetry-history). The Tang literatus Meng Qi 孟棨 (?–?, ninth century) famously commented: “When a poetic incantation is occasioned by an event, it is precisely where deep feelings concentrate” (chushi xingyong, yousuo zhongqing 觸事興詠, 尤所鍾情).59 Meng Qi considers both the circumstantial and emotive functions of qing, thus articulating the reciprocal relationship between historical experience and poetic mind. According to Zhang Hui 張暉, Meng Qi derives his notion of “poet-historian” from two origins, the historiographical discourse of Chunqiu 春秋 (Spring and autumn annals) that interweaves evidential record with moralistic commentary, and the medieval poetics of yuanqing and wuse 物色 (sensuous colors of physical things; the appearances of physical things) that contemplates a subject’s sensorial responses to both the inner and outer world.60
Meng Qi’s engagement with poetry as history points to one important factor of poetic manifestation since ancient times, explained succinctly by Owen: “the process of [poetic] manifestation must begin in the external world, which has priority without primacy. As a latent pattern follows its innate disposition to become manifest, passing from the world to mind to literature, a theory of sympathetic resonance is involved.”61 Accordingly, when Du Fu 杜甫 is recognized as the arch-practitioner of “poetry-history” (shishi 詩史), this refers not merely to the poet’s historiographical and mimetic capacity but also to his vision, which makes his poetic mind resonate with historical and cosmic turbulences. As Owen puts it, Du Fu’s poetry is not supposed to be treated as “a fiction: it is a unique factual account of an experience in historical time, a human consciousness encountering, interpreting, and responding to the world.”62
The deliberation and practice of “poetry-history” reached a climax in the late Ming and early Qing, coinciding with dynastic cataclysms. The most compelling case is that of the Ming loyalist Huang Zongxi. When Huang declares: “Where history collapses, poetry arises” (shiwang erhou shizuo 史亡而後詩作),63 he is soliciting lyrical evocation not only as a testimony to dynastic catastrophe but also as a re-vision of both historical consciousness and the poetic mind.64 Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 (1582–1664), on the other hand, is said to have valorized the lyrical bearing in the Ming loyalist discourse of “poetry-history.” Beyond the conventional wisdom of reflectionism, Qian treats poetry as immanent to the constitution of history, thus considering the mood, imagery, and tone of poetry not rhetorical gestures but a psychological—even ontological—index to the unrelieved expression of the poet’s historical bearing. As Lawrence Yim argues, “the shishi is the ideal kind of lyricism to bring poetry and history together.”65
Finally, studies have been undertaken to understand the poetic expression of shuqing by looking into the formation of a cognitive system in ancient China. Citing examples from the rhapsody of the Han, Cheng Yuyu suggests that qing is a repository of sensorial data as well as epistemological sources. The literary exercise of shuqing, accordingly, prevailed in ancient Chinese culture because it not only helped modulate sentiments in public and private spheres but also facilitated the production of knowledge. By evoking analogues and categorical associations (yinpi lianlei 引譬連類), shuqing incorporates sensory vibrations, metaphorical figures, and intellectual ruminations into a taxonomy of naming the world, thereby giving rise to knowledge.66 On the other hand, with the rise of medieval poetry as his case in point, Xiao Chi 蕭馳 suggests that Chinese lyricism has to be understood as part and parcel of the changing paradigm of cosmological inquiry from the Han to the Wei and Jin eras.67 Echoing Zhu Guangqian and Kao Yu-kung , Xiao holds that the lüshi 律詩 (regulated verse) of the Tang represents the perfect manifestation of a poetic form of the cosmic order.68
The above description is by no means an exhaustive summary of the roots and ramifications of qing and shuqing. Nor does it implicate a coherent, causal linkage between the premodern legacy and its modern appropriations. I only intend to illuminate that Chinese lyricism had already developed a rich and contested discourse before encountering Western and Japanese sources. With this background in mind, we turn to Chen Shih-hsiang, Shen Congwen, and Jaroslav Průšek. These three critics, from the Sinophone diaspora, China, and the European Sinological circle, offer three distinct approaches to Chinese lyricism in the mid-twentieth century.
Inventing the “Lyrical Tradition”: Chen Shih-hsiang
In 1971, Chen Shih-hsiang presented “On Chinese Lyrical Tradition” at the annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies. In the essay, Chen looks at Chinese literature from a comparative perspective and concludes that, whereas the epic and drama characterize Western literature, the “lyrical tradition stands out” in Chinese literature.69 This lyrical tradition is said to have originated with the Classic of Poetry and the Songs of the South, flourished in subsequent centuries in forms such as fu 賦 (rhapsody) and yuefu 樂府 (songs of the music bureau style), and found the most exuberant expressions in the poetry of the Six Dynasties and the Tang. Moreover, “when drama and the narrative art of the novel finally did make their amazingly late appearance on the scene, lyricism continued to dominate, infiltrate, or if you will, subvert them.”70 Chen suggests:
Song, or word-music, in formal structure, and subjectivity and self-expression in content or intent, are, by definition, the two basic components of the lyric. Shih Ching [The Classic of Poetry] and Ch’u Tz’u [The Songs of the South], as fountain-head for the Chinese literary tradition, combine the two, with one or the other dominating each. Thus the main course of all later Chinese literary activity was set, even as the tradition grew and expanded. It was henceforth foredoomed, so to say, to be predominantly lyrical.71
Chen later adds two points: that the lyrical, subjective expression is to be found “in private or in public,”72 and that “lyricism as the essence of the Chinese, and perhaps much of several other Far Eastern literary traditions, may help explain many phenomena in matters of both traditional forms and value judgments, distinguishable and maybe sometimes at odds, between East and West.”73 Ultimately, Chen argues that “it is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to say that the Chinese literary tradition as a whole is a lyrical tradition … to that extent it may be variously representative of other Far Eastern traditions.”74
Chen indicates that his appraisal of Chinese literature presupposes his reflection on the Western canon, and that he proposes the “lyrical tradition” as a way to respond to the (Western) assumption that all literature originates with the epic and drama. Behind his postulation of the quintessential Chinese lyrical tradition, therefore, is a self-conscious effort to rectify the Occidental format of temporality: to the predominant Western literary tradition, there exists in China a distinct counterpart. Chen’s emphasis on the lyrical as the “orthodoxy” of Chinese (and even Far Eastern) literature nevertheless smacks of essentialism on its own terms. He verges on being excessively inclusive when enlisting the multiple forms of Chinese literary expressions in a monolithic “lyrical tradition.” Furthermore, by streamlining other East Asian literary traditions into one “Chinese lyrical tradition,” he displays a symptom of Sinocentrism similar to the Eurocentrism he sets out to critique. Chen never had an opportunity to elaborate on his essay, however; he passed away a few months after his AAS presentation.
Granting these debatable points, Chen Shih-shiang’s observation must be regarded as the crux of a series of studies on Chinese lyricism throughout the mid-twentieth century. By then, critics such as Tang Junyi in Hong Kong, Xu Fuguan in Taiwan, Shen Congwen on the mainland, and Hu Lancheng in Japan had each proposed a lyrical analysis of Chinese civilization. None, however, could have sounded as magisterial as Chen in making the case. The “Chinese lyrical tradition” has since traveled among overseas Chinese communities; interpretations and debates have proliferated in such a way as to generate a meta-tradition of the “lyrical tradition.”75 Chinese scholars on the mainland have started to pay tribute to the “lyrical tradition” in recent years too. This fact leads one to reconsider Chen’s thesis and ponder its contribution to mid-twentieth-century poetics.
Chen Shih-hsiang started his inquiry into the “lyrical tradition” as early as 1949. In “In Search of the Beginning of Chinese Literary Criticism,”76 he differentiates the origin of Chinese literature from its Western counterpart by highlighting the supremacy of poetry (shi 詩). He looks into the archaeological roots and etymological developments of shiyanzhi (poetry expresses what is intended in the mind), the predominant statement of Chinese poetics, suggesting that in its “ancient pictorial written form [shi] has three variants of meaning: ‘foot,’ ‘to stop,’ and ‘to go.’”77 Chen proposes that shi 詩 and zhi 志 share the same root of ㄓ, which implies both “move forward” (zhi 之) and “stop” (zhi 止); by extension, that which stops with the mind is zhi 志, and that which moves forward and finds an outer expression is shi 詩. Chen refers to Wen Yiduo’s 聞一多 (1899–1946) analysis,78 but he scores in his own right by stressing the rhythmic corporeal movement implied in the pictographic composition of ㄓ: “ㄓ indicates not only the pause but also the directional movement and action of the elephant foot. That the foot moves and stops, stops and moves, points to the most natural trait of the primitive construct of rhythm.”79
Chen concludes that the “riddle-like” phrase of shiyanzhi has led to “the advocacy of all kinds of moral, ethical and political purposes for literature. At the other extreme, it would be just as easy [to associate the word with] the feeling and the emotional experience of the individual, spontaneously expressed.”80 Chen brings in at this juncture another equally famous statement, shiyuanqing 詩緣情 (poetry follows from emotion) articulated by Lu Ji. Although the two statements point to the bifurcated development of Chinese literary thought, Chen observes, they are mutually implicated. Chen elaborates his argument in “The Shih-ching: Its Generic Significance in Chinese Literary History and Poetics” (1969), in which he refers to the “lyric” as a generic term for describing Chinese poetry.81 “Juxtaposed against the Platonic declaration that ‘all mythology and poetry is a narration of events, either past, present, or to come,’ would have been the contemporary Chinese phrase shih yen chih [shiyanzhi] serving as a counter statement, that ‘poetry,’ as a generic term, ‘speaks the heart’s desire.’ Shih by nominalistic definition is a ‘song-word,’ hence ‘lyric’ in the fullest sense as a working term for our modern criticism.”82
Chen Shih-hsiang names xing 興—spontaneous outburst of feeling—as the core factor inspiring Chinese poetry. In “The Shih-ching,” he takes up the conclusion of Shang Chengzuo’s 商承祚 and Guo Moruo’s oracle bone studies by describing xing as the “primitive ‘heave-ho’ or ‘hurrah,’ ejaculation in joy and high spirits. This was probably done with a feeling of emotional and physical uplift by a group turning round a central object while joining hands in a dancing circle.”83 Chen believes that herein lies the primeval origin of the songs as shi, which was to become the name for all later Chinese poetry:
The primitive voices, transformed and refined into prosodic devices and conventions in their texts, still strike us, despite their great diversity, as a general “tonality,” to which Mao [The annotative discourse originating with Mao Heng], with perhaps very imperfect remembrance, gave prominence by reminding us of the common term hsing [xing].84
But what really interests Chen is the vision of “fresh world” xing brings about. He believes that xing injects into the songs “in terms of formal distinction, the ancient integrity, the oneness or the unity of the musical speech and the rhythm of the spontaneous and simultaneous primeval ‘uplifting dance.’”85 It brings an appeal that is “instantaneous, even kinetic as well as imagistic.”86 The “spontaneous,” “simultaneous,” “instantaneous,” “kinetic,” and “imagistic” qualities, when realized in the sonorous patterns of “onomatopoeia, doublets, alliterations, rhymes and pararhymes,” constitute the xing element, the “soul of the lyric.”87
Having established xing as the fundamental motivation of Chinese poetry, Chen Shih-hsiang proceeds to contemplate how time and subjective consciousness are introduced to the “lyrical tradition,” turning his focus to the Songs of the South. In “The Genesis of Poetic Time: The Greatness of Ch’ü Yuan [Qu Yuan], Studied with a New Critical Approach” (published posthumously in 1973), Chen explains that the Songs of the South not only creates the first affective subjectivity in Chinese poetry but also inaugurates historical “time” as the defining factor of the subjective awareness: “the overwhelming power and the most compelling aspect of the poems come from the way in which [Qu Yuan] deals with time and event in terms of a highly tragic posture and subjective tonality.”88 From a comparative perspective, Chen suggests that “before it took on the new, affective aspect in subjective thought from Renaissance to the Reformation, time in the West had a firmly established name.”89 By contrast, time and subjectivity received much less rigorous examination in ancient Chinese civilization. It is in Qu Yuan’s Tianwen 天問 (Interrogations of heaven), Chen argues, that the “challenging question of all ages” was asked: “What is time? Or what does time do?” (weishi hewei 維時何為).90 But Qu Yuan’s question is said to have led not to philosophical rumination, as did its Western counterparts, but to “poetic genesis”; it gave rise to the passionate, affective expression of time.91 Time, accordingly, is always already a “strongly personalized time” and a lyrical provocation.92 One thus finds in Qu Yuan’s songs the “deep pathos of irrevocable temporality, the anxiety to cultivate and develop so as to maintain his ‘virtue,’ his human essence, to withstand the ravages of time.”93
This lyricized consciousness of time traverses historical temporalities and reveals the cosmic magnitude of the poetic mind. To Chen, the poet who best exemplifies such a consciousness is Du Fu, the “poet-historian.” Chen’s example is Du Fu’s “Bazhentu” 八陣圖 (The design of eightfold array), a jueju 絕句 (quatrain) poem commemorating the turning point of medieval Chinese history, the Battle at Red Cliff (chibi zhizhan 赤壁之戰, 208 A.D.). As he suggests, vacillating between dynastic vicissitudes and human vanities, personal contemplations and the dispassionate continuum of Nature, Du Fu manages to encapsulate the various forms of temporal dynamics in a poem of twenty characters, thus achieving a most exquisite composition and contemplation of time.94
Rigorous philological scholarship aside, Chen’s reading of poetic time is fortified by a series of references to modern Western poets and thinkers, from T. S. Eliot to W. B. Yeats, from Georges Poulet to Martin Heidegger. As a result, Chen makes his Qu Yuan look like a poet suffering from both historical agnostic pathos and modern existentialist angst. In the case of Du Fu, what really impresses Chen is the Tang master’s capacity to integrate multiple threads of time into an “organic” linguistic plenitude in New Critical terms. A good jueju poem, “like a sculpture, is ‘in the round.’”95 Chen draws inspiration also from Spinoza, Schlegel, Maurice Maeterlinck, Kenneth Burke, and Henri Bergson, among others.
At stake here is Chen’s own temporal agenda with regard to the Chinese “lyrical tradition.” Judging by the way he describes xing in phenomenological terms and lyricizes time within the New Critical framework of synchronicity, Chen’s lyrical project seems to be both antiquarianism and modernism. But for all his modern(ist) references, Chen shows little intention to incorporate the modern time into his great tradition. His writings even give the impression that his “lyrical tradition” came to a halt before Chinese literature crossed the threshold of the twentieth century.
Chen’s (unwitting) omission of the modern moment may suggest his acquiescence to the conventional dichotomization of modernity and tradition, or it may reflect his cultural nostalgia. But these are easy answers. Before he came to the United States and became a classicist, Chen was a modernist. This fact makes us think hard about the complex motivations behind his “lyrical tradition” and ask how he transformed himself from a modernist into a classicist and reconciled his modernist, Western literary training with his recently found passion for premodern Chinese poetics. To further explore the “origin” of Chen’s “lyrical tradition,” we must turn to his earlier years.
Chen Shih-hsiang was actively involved in modernist activities during his student days at Peking University (1929–1932). He befriended Bian Zhilin, He Qifang, and Li Guangtian 李廣田 (1906–1968)—the well-known Hanyuan Trio (Hanyuan sanyou 漢園三友)—and belongs to the loosely defined Beijing Modernist School (Jingpai 京派).96 Chen was also close to Sir Harold Acton (1904–1994), a self-styled “aesthete” and advocate for modernist literature.97 Through Acton, Chen became familiar with the works of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. Chen and Acton later cotranslated and coedited Modern Chinese Poetry, the first anthology in English that features young Chinese modernist poets such as Dai Wangshu 戴望舒 (1905–1950), Wen Yiduo, Bian Zhilin, and Lin Geng 林庚 (1910–2006).
Two figures played significant roles during Chen’s formative years. I. A. Richards (1893–1979), a Cambridge professor and forerunner of New Criticism, came to teach at Tsing-hua University between 1929 and 1930 and quickly attracted an entourage in Peking. Richards contended that literary creation is an activity through which human faculties are summoned and organized in a coherent, organic form, and that literature provides an aesthetic criterion against which humanity can be judged. Both literary creation and appreciation, accordingly, involve a cognitive process that attests to the working of the human mind independent of referential distractions.98 Chen was also influenced by Zhu Guangqian, the leading figure of modern Chinese aesthetics. Zhu’s scholarship reflects the impacts of not only Kant and Croce but also Vico and Nietzsche, among others; his thesis on the psychology of tragedy was inspired by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. He passionately promotes Chinese aesthetic modernity by means of “intuition” (Croce), “distance” (Edward Bullough), and “Einfühlung” or empathy (Theodor Lipps).99 Bonnie McDougall calls attention to Zhu Guangqian’s dialogue with Richards, which led Zhu to modify his Kantian-Crocean model of aesthetic autonomy.100 Equally notable is Zhu’s concomitant reappraisal of traditional Chinese poetics, from the “fusion of feeling and scene” to the musicality of Tang regulated verse.101
Chen Shih-hsiang’s search for modernist poetics culminated in 1937. He sighs in a poem, “Jinri de shi” 今日的詩 (Poetry of today):
The magnificent mirage amid the ether,
the eternal abode of the soul.
The cosmos will unveil:
reality is nothing but fog
and fog is reality
—and when humanity arrives where
a stubborn and proud land
and an inscrutable, eternally phantasmal river
both end on the seashore,
a magnificent thing in the ether
breaks through the veil, uttering and becoming the poetry of today.102
氤氲裏奇麗的蜃樓
是永恒的靈魂的居室。
當宇宙將顯示出：
現實只是霧，
霧只是現實。
—而人的行程以行至
冥頑自負的陸
與飄渺永幻的河流
同止於海岸時，
原是在氤氳裏奇麗的神物
乃衝破了紗幛歌成了今日的詩。
This is a meta-poem in which Chen offers a mini-ars poetica of his own. Whereas reality is seen as nothing but fog and humanity has reached the shore of the unknown, Chen writes, poetry is the only viable vehicle through which life takes shape.
With such a background, Chen Shih-hsiang could have continued to pursue modernism in the States. But he developed instead a new commitment to classical Chinese literature. In 1948, seven years after leaving China, Chen contributed a translation of Lu Ji’s “Essay on Literature” to National Peking University’s Semi-centennial Papers.103 This marks Chen’s formal attempt to engage classical literary studies. He claims that he set out to translate “Essay” because it is not only a canonical work in classical Chinese criticism but also a literary masterpiece on its own terms.104 But behind such a scholarly pretext, other reasons might loom.
Chen Shih-hsiang notes that Lu Ji lived in one of “the darkest ages in man’s history,”105 underlined by incessant social upheavals and court intrigues of the bloodiest kind. Paradoxically, the historical adversities set the stage for the first blossoming of Chinese lyricism. As Chen points out, this time witnessed the advent of Chinese poetic expressionism as well as a variety of cultural and artistic innovations. Lu Ji’s literary engagement creates only one of the vibrant profiles of his time. One peculiar thing is that Chen Shih-hsiang takes a special interest in the timing of Lu Ji’s writing “Essay on Literature.” Through meticulous research, he concludes that Lu Ji completed the piece in 300 A.D, a time that coincided with a coup d’état in which Lu was involved. Although he survived the bloody outcome, even gaining a promotion, Lu Ji witnessed the death of many of his acquaintances, including his benefactor Zhang Hua 張華 (232–300).
Chen Shih-hsiang considers it no coincidence that Lu Ji underwent a burst of creativity at this juncture. Lu Ji is said to have all along been fascinated by the frailty of life and the futility of any form of redemption; ironically, the coup was so brutal as to drive him to produce a series of writings crowned by “Essay on Literature.”106 Hence the exclamation of his brother, Lu Yun 陸雲 (262–303): “Brother, all of a sudden you have created so many pieces, and each one of them so new and extraordinary, that you make me really feel terrified.”107 Lu Yun was “terrified” perhaps not by the speed at which his brother produced the writings so much as the way he celebrates literature—wen 文—under such perilous circumstances. As Lu Ji claims in “Essay on Literature,” through modulating language and feeling, belles lettres can help make better sense of the world, thereby bridging the finite and the infinite. Thus, historical treachery turns out to have been the impetus to his creativity, as if only through literary imagination and craftsmanship could he suspend the gnawing fear of human ephemerality and free himself from the “ominous age of gathering gloom.”108
Chen Shih-hsiang titles the 1948 edition of his translation of “Essay on Literature” Literature as Light Against Darkness. He must have been aware that “light” constitutes one of the key images of “Essay,” which refers not only to human sensory faculties but also to wisdom and vision on a philosophical and religious scale.109 Meanwhile, he quotes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost:
At his second bidding darkness fled,
Light shone, and order from disorder sprung.110
Chen feels justified in making the comparative reference because “the truth [Lu Ji] spoke … gives one a pleasantly curious feeling to identify the resemblance between some critics and poets despite the vast distance in time and space.”111 Moreover, Chen explicates Lu Ji’s “passionate leap in the dark” in light of Kierkegaardian “despair”112 and compares Lu Ji with Kafka: both espouse the “homeless identity.”113 Above all, Chen starts the 1953 edition with an epigraph of Stéphane Mallarmé’s famous line: “Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.”
The way Chen highlights the “skewed” temporality in poetry takes us to ponder how time plays out in Chen’s own “lyrical tradition.” If the lyrical, as the crystallized form of poetry, indicates the epiphanic moment independent of the flux of time, the “lyrical tradition” as Chen conceives of it must take a twofold dimension. The “tradition” may mean either the eternal return of the originary time of plenitude or, equally suggestive, a succession of flights into the existential closure of contemporaneity. Either way, time as implied by “lyrical” and “tradition” becomes equivocal; it may at any moment lose its orientation and enter an atemporal state, a state of xing.
But does time really disappear in Chen’s “lyrical tradition”? We can speculate about his motivation for translating “Essay” in 1948 and promoting the “lyrical tradition” ever after. Chen left China at the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War. He witnessed overseas that victory did not bring peace but plunged the Chinese into another vicious cycle of war. Contemplating the fate of his country on the eve of the impending Communist takeover, he might very well have tried to seek a correlative answer in Lu Ji’s case of more than sixteen hundred years before. For Chen, the date—300 A.D.—is a moment of “terrifying beauty” because it suggests the juncture where political catastrophe entails poetic elation, and corporeal mortality gives rise to literary infinitude. He therefore comes to the conclusion that whereas history embodies itself as “Necessity,” poetry sets in as the “Creative” force that “is all Possibility and Freedom itself.”114
Indeed, as China’s political campaigns accelerated in the late fifties, Chen became increasingly engaged in the “lyrical tradition.” Looking back in the midst of national crisis, he found in the lyrical mode of xing—a moment of caesura that registers the power of qing/feeling over the flux of time—the way to imagine literature and history anew. Meanwhile, he spared no effort reconciling the “ravages of time” with lyrical subjectivity’s vision of instantaneity and spontaneity. His discovery of “the lyrical tradition” becomes symptomatic of one generation of intellectuals in diaspora, showing how the pain of lived historical experience can alter one’s perception of literature itself. In this sense, Chen’s greatest contribution may be his effort to retroactively evoke, to “lyricize,” à la the poetics of xing, a literary tradition and even history in crisis.
Archaeology of Feeling: Shen Congwen
In Qingdao in the summer of 1961, Shen Congwen wrote an essay titled “Chouxiang de shuqing” 抽象的抒情 (Abstract lyricism), in which he observes that in human life “change is a constancy, contradiction is a constancy, and destruction is a constancy.” While ephemerality and transience constitute human destiny,
only when transformed into language, image, musical note, and rhythm can a certain form, a certain state of life, take a concrete shape, forming another kind of existence and continuance. As a result, through the slow passage of time and the far and remote transference of space, human beings who live in different times and places will be able to feel the influx of life between each other and experience no obstruction.115
Shen Congwen recommends literature and artifacts as the way to illuminate life, which is otherwise but a sequence of changes, contradictions, and destructions. But he is equally aware that literature and artworks, as human constructs, are no less subject to these threats. He notes that “only a very minor part of [literature and the arts] can survive the nullifying power of time thanks to pure luck, and become known” to people of subsequent generations.116
The exercise of “abstract lyricism” calls for a special kind of connoisseurship through which to unearth and re-member that which is available only in figural and fragmentary forms. Such an undertaking may not result in any concrete outcome, due to all kinds of contingencies, of which censorship, destruction, and oblivion are only the most obvious. What matters, according to Shen, is the poetic subject’s ability to generate from these historical cracks a gamut of imaginary agencies, and to invite reverberations among zhiyin 知音 or like-minded souls of other times and spaces.117 Shen thus reminds us of Walter Benjamin, who, trapped in a different cultural and historical context, observed that “redemption depends on the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe.”118
Shen had been the most acclaimed nativist writer of the thirties, with a long list of works such as Biancheng 邊城 (Border town, 1934) and Xiangxing sanji 湘行散記 (Notes on a trip to Hunan, 1936) to his credit.119 However, Shen had to pay the price for his vision of China during the revolutionary age. He was labeled “reactionary” and “pornographic” by Guo Moruo in 1948.120 When political and personal pressures became too grave to bear in the following year, he suffered a nervous breakdown and tried to commit suicide. Shen was denied access to the post-1949 literary field; instead, he was assigned to serve as a researcher in the National Museum of History.121 His duties included examining and recording a multitude of artworks from various origins and times.
But Shen continued to explore the possibility of writing in the new era.122 The year 1961 promised such a possibility; the Great Leap Forward was winding down and the political wind seemed to blow in a different direction. Shen composed at this time a series of classical-style poems about his visit to Jinggang Mountain, the historical site of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and contemplated a fiction project about the martyrdom of Zhang Dinghe 張鼎和, Shen’s brother-in-law.123 However, “Abstract Lyricism” came across as a most peculiar attempt, for during an era of “revolutionary realism” and “revolutionary romanticism,” even references to terms like “abstract” or “lyricism” already sounded ideologically suspect. The fact that the essay remained unfinished and unpublished until after Shen passed away bespeaks his own qualms about it.
In the essay, Shen takes issue with the conventionally defined “abstract” and “lyrical.” Instead of the common wisdom that literature and the arts, the reservoir of feeling, transcend time and space, Shen tells us over and over again how frail humanity is in coping with historical changes, how much literary and artistic endeavor is occasioned by specific circumstances, and yet how little it can withstand ruination as time passes. Even if select works do survive, they exist mostly in fragmentary forms, in either a material or cognitive sense. To talk about “abstract lyricism,” therefore, is not a metaphysical musing but an “archaeological” excavation of feeling—from sensory mutations to fantastic flights in a given historical time—as encrypted in artistic and literary forms. In view of Shen Congwen’s endeavor to rescue feeling from a civilization already in shambles, to “abstract” from the remnants of objects an imaginary structure, Wang Zengqi 汪曾祺 (1920–1997), Shen Congwen’s student at Southwestern Associated University and a superb lyrical writer in his own right, calls his mentor’s task shuqing kaoguxue 抒情考古學, or “lyrical archaeology.”124
Observant as he was, Wang Zengqi never pursued the conceptual tension between the two terms “lyrical” and “archaeology,” let alone their relationship to “abstract” lyricism. The implication of “lyrical archaeology,” therefore, is itself subject to archaeological research. I seek in the following to expound the historical context in which Shen played out the dialectic of the tangible and the abstract; the concept of materiality underlying his “archaeology”; and the emotional trope that motivates his undertaking. To begin with, take a look at a statement in “Abstract Lyricism.”
It would simplify many things if [the government authorities] take the intellectuals’ expressions in either verbal or textual form as a “lyrical” exercise. Indeed, their essence is no more than lyrical. Above all, to intellectuals who have little knowledge of material production and struggle, whatever they say and write amounts to no more than a lyrical expression inspired by encountering a scene (jijing shuqing 即景抒情). … Such a lyrical inclination, from a biological or psychological point of view, may as well be a self-adjustment, not too different from murmurs in a dream.125
Shen could not sound more self-deprecating here, comparing intellectuals like himself to daydreamers. This statement, however, becomes polemical when read in light of another one where Shen suggests that literary and artistic creation depends not so much on theoretical rumination as on the “emancipation of feeling” (qingxu de shifang 情緒的釋放): “This ‘feeling’ bears a classical connotation, one that is different from the con-temporary definition as we are using it. A true materialist (weiwulun zhe 唯物論者) will understand my point.”126
Can a “true materialist” understand Shen Congwen’s abstract lyricism? Recent studies have revealed more about Shen’s efforts to participate in the socialist body in the fifties. He is said to have studied hard Mao’s theories, and summarized his learning as a “commonsensical knowledge of ‘materialism’” (weiwu de changshi 唯物的常識) and a “research method based on work and experience.”127 Above all, he contends that all work “should start with something concrete rather than something abstract.”128
Still, when justifying his theory as “materialist,” Shen betrays a creative misreading. We are obliged to take his hint and look into the “classical connotation” of his self-styled materialism. In premodern Chinese poetics, whereas qing refers to both inner feeling and (actual or conceptual) circumstances, wu 物 (object, thing, material) intimates the multiple forms of the world, from physical faculties to natural existences and cosmic movements. Qing and wu are not exclusive of but interactive with each other. Liu Xie’s 劉勰 (465?–520?) Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 (Literary mind and carving the dragon) serves as one of the most important sources in this regard. Whereas in the chapter “Shensi” 神思 (Spiritual thought), Liu Xie uses wu to refer to the broader philosophical sense of “object,” “meaning whatever might be encountered by mind in spiritual journey,” in “Wuse” 物色 (Sensuous colors of physical things; the appearances of physical things), he considers wu in light of “physical things of the natural world, sensuous presences.”129 When the materiality of wu and the emotive agency of qing interact, literary creativity bursts out. Hence “the sensuous colors of physical things are stirred into movement, so the mind, too, is shaken”; “by these things our affections are shifted, and from our affections language comes.”130
Even more importantly, Shen’s understanding of qing and wu enables him to address the human capacity of abstraction—in terms of categorization, configuration, and symbolization—in any encounter with the world. The best demonstration of this capacity, as suggested above, is literary and artistic endeavor. Take a look at Liu Xie’s famous statement:
When poets were stirred by physical things, the categorical associations were endless. They remained drifting through all images of the world, even to their limit, and brooded thoughtfully on each small realm of what they saw and heard. They sketched qi 氣 [material force] and delineated outward appearance, as they themselves were rolled round and round in the course of things; they applied coloration and matched sounds, lingering on about things with their minds.131
Liu Xie’s statement helps shed light on Shen Congwen’s point. For Shen, wu is not an inanimate existence but a transitive and transforming process, ever interacting with the human agent. The poet (or artist) is enacted by his encounter with wu while acting on it; he discerns and generates abstractions as embodied by creative objects. The process of abstraction, as Shen indicates, implies not only aesthetic but also cognitive, affective, and therapeutic functions.
My next question has to do with the kind of feeling Shen seeks to “excavate” (and abstract) through lyrical archaeology. Shen indicated that he should have been a poet by nature, and that his poetic sensibilities were deeply rooted in the culture of Chu 楚 that thrives in the region of West Hunan, his birthplace. He describes his writing as immersed in “the blood of the Chu people” (churen de xueye 楚人的血液). The Chu civilization, however, met with incessant setbacks throughout history, endowing a descendant like Shen with an inborn “traumatism” (cuoshang 挫傷).132 The trauma “may come either from the inherently weak character of an old people, or from the responses of a civilization to the eternal blows of the harshest kind. Whether I ‘write’ or I ‘don’t write,’ traces of such severe blows haunt me.”133 They are “symptoms of my infected feelings.”134 Shen Congwen referred many times to his indebtedness to the Songs of the South, the ultimate expression of the Chu culture and its inborn traumatism.135
I suggest that Shen Congwen’s approach to the Chu culture and the Songs of the South enabled him to render the emotional trope of Chinese poetics, yuan 怨 or expression of dissent and pathos, anew. Yuan is one of the four functions of Confucian poetics, which also include xing 興 (evocation), guan 觀 (contemplation/observation), and qun 群 (collectivity).136 Traditional Chinese literary discourse tends to valorize the creative thrust of xing; by contrast, yuan has been subordinated due to its negative implication of emotional discontent.137 In the Confucian context, yuan is supposed to be channeled through poetry so as to attain the state of benevolence—ren 仁. Under Shen Congwen’s treatment, however, yuan connotes more of the poetic subject’s inward, melancholy turn than of its intent to critique and rectify (as projected by Confucian poetics). Shen particularly wanted to situate yuan in the context of the Chu culture as exemplified by the Songs of the South, thereby associating yuan with the “inborn traumatism” he believed he inhabited.
Thus, Shen became a most compelling modern spokesperson for the concept of saoyanzhi 騷言志, or poetry that expresses intent as evinced in the Songs of the South,138 in contrast with shiyanzhi, or poetry that expresses intent in the vein of the Classic of Poetry. The archetypal poet of saoyanzhi is none other than Qu Yuan. With the suicide of Qu Yuan as his example, Li Zehou relates the emotional trope of the Songs of the South to a deep-seated fixation on selfhood and melancholia, so unfathomable that it cannot be released until the self-annihilation of subjectivity itself.139 Poetry becomes an ambiguous testimony to the subject’s creative urge and death wish.140
In the above section on Chen Shih-hsiang, I discuss the way Chen invokes xing as the originary force of Chinese lyrical tradition. Xing represents for Chen a vibrant, creative thrust that motivates the beginning of the (cosmic, natural, human, and poetic) world. Yuan, as Shen Congwen would have it, points to a profound emotional and cognitive setback as a result of the poetic subject’s frustrating encounter with that world.141 Chen Shih-hsiang finds in the Classic of Poetry the evocative element of xing, confirming the ever-generative power of lyric consciousness. By contrast, yuan as Shen Congwen conceives of it has less to do with any originary, creative impulse than with the emotional lacuna induced by the loss of origin. This lacuna nevertheless serves as the (traumatic) cause of creativity. Yuan can be politically motivated, but it intimates a more profound, ontological ressentiment. It drives the poet to either abysmal searches or fantastic escapades while promising no resolution. At its most intense, it brings forth what I call elsewhere “anticipatory nostalgia,” a preemptive mourning of what is yet to be lost or what has never even existed.142 The result is a state of restlessness that has been vividly expressed by Shen:
I am forever restless because the past returns to haunt me often. To each his own destiny: this I know. Some things of the past perpetually gnaw the inside of me. When I talk about them, you would think they were only stories. Nobody can understand how a person feels who lives day after day under the weight of hundreds of stories like these.143
When Shen first pondered abstract lyricism, his yearning for lyrical abstraction coincided with his increased discontent with the form of realist narrative that had made him famous. He sought arduously to experiment with new styles throughout the forties. As he claims at the end of his story “Kanhong lu” 看虹錄 (Gazing at a rainbow, 1941):
I have dispelled all my “past” and “present” experiences and abstractions, giving up the power to analyze the meaning of their existence. I have never fashioned the patterns I understand of Life into language and forms that create a new model for Life and the soul. … It is as if I use the Abstract to torment my own soul and flesh; it is painful, and the same time enjoyable.144
Abstraction entails form as much as it dismantles form. In the next few years, Shen published a series of sketches and stories (such as Qiseyan 七色魘 [Seven-colored nightmares, 1944–1947]) characterized by an evasive narrative structure, obscure imagery, and philosophical overtones. At the same time, he expressed his search in theoretical terms. In “Zhuxu” 燭虛 (Candle extinguished, 1941), he notes, “things which can be inscribed in language are nothing but the trash of one’s fantasy.”145 In “Shuiyun” 水雲 (Water cloud, 1942), he contends, “I don’t understand the distinction between truth and falsehood in literature; nor can I tell their difference in feeling. What matters in literature and arts is beauty or the lack of beauty.”146 Finally, he proclaims in “Xiaoshuo chuangzuo” 小説創作 (On fiction writing, 1941): “To express a beautiful impression in abstract terms, language is less efficient than painting, painting is less efficient than mathematics, mathematics is less efficient than music.”147
Shen’s experiments drew criticisms from both the left and the right because they were so out of tune with his earlier nativist writing on the one hand and the orthodox wartime discourse on the other. They are, however, symptoms of “his infected feelings” with regard to the precarious time.148 For Shen, wars, ideologies, and fixations on the immediate reality had driven his countrymen to the extremes of either stupor or fanaticism. Before any new plan for the future can be successfully implemented, he considers it more urgent to retrieve from the extant or ruined civilizations something, be it called “beauty,” “virtue,” “divinity,” or “feeling,” that may be of significance for the new age. As he puts it, “if the breakdown of abstract values and principles is part of the cause of social chaos, for those writers still harboring self-respect and self-confidence, they should re-create a new principle in their works. They should recognize that a perfect work embodies a perfect order.”149
Shen is aware that his call for abstract values is conditioned by historical atrocities and more pessimistically, that these values have always already broken down. His lyrical project is therefore destined to be partial and even futile, as any “discovery” only speaks to the untenability of human effort in the past, as in the present. Abstract lyricism, in this sense, projects no more idealization than its unavailability in the real:
I am going crazy, crazy about abstraction. I see a cluster of signs, a patch of form, a spool of threads, a piece of music without sound, a poem without language. I see the most complete forms of life. All these exist well in abstraction but all are destroyed in reality.150
Literature as such could no longer help Shen spell out his predicament, as attested by the fact that he could neither complete his nativist project (as in the case of Long River) nor find a modernist alternative (as in the case of “Gazing at Rainbow”).
At this juncture, Shen began to pay attention to art objects. He had always been interested in calligraphy, painting, woodblock prints, and folk artworks.151 The objects appeared as specimens of the world of wu, guiding him to the domain where the practice of everyday life and its figural representation interplay with each other. As he describes,
From a shade of color, a spool of thread, a piece of bronze, a pile of clay, and a cluster of words, plus a variety of art obtained through my own life, I acquired a basic but comprehensive understanding of [Chinese humanities]. Thanks to this education, a “country man” (like me) … was able to develop a broad interest in exploring the wisdom of history.152
These objects come to his view as remainders, and reminders, of human engagements with history. Though taken out of the specific context from which they arose, their formal configuration and material existence nevertheless enact an imaginary communication with bygone times.
For example, in 1947, Shen published “Du Zhan Ziqian youchuntu” 讀展子謙游春圖 (Reading Zhan Ziqian’s Spring Excursion), an essay on a painting, Spring Excursion, allegedly by the Sui artist Zhan Ziqian 展子謙 (550?–617?). This painting had been regarded as a rare treasure because it provided the missing link between Six Dynasties and Tang landscape paintings. Shen takes issue with the painting’s authenticity. He bases his argument on the historical accounts of Zhan Ziqian’s style, the subject of the spring excursion as treated in other periods, the brushstrokes of the painting in question, the quality of its silk material, the method of its mounting, and even its color scheme. Shen pays special attention to the painted figures’ clothing fashions and sitting posture, concluding that they are characteristic not of the Sui or early Tang era (ca. seventh century) but of the late Tang and Five Dynasties (ca. tenth century). Finally, through a cross-reading of the song lyrics and historical records of the latter periods, he suggests that the painting may belong to a series of works by the Western Shu painters.
Shen Congwen’s study is distinctive in that he refuses to make any impressionistic comments in the conventional literati manner. He seeks instead to verify the painting’s material features, such as fabric quality and mounting technique, as well as the social manners and fashions depicted. More important, Shen’s meticulous inquiry does not serve its own end. He suggests that the authenticity of the painting hinges not only on the accuracy of the material references but also on the “feel” they call forth. Shen understands that material evidence does not bring back the reality but serves only as a clue to illuminate the lost time. In other words, his study becomes meaningful only when it sheds light on the way people inhabit, imagine, and craft reality at the time under discussion. All that once enlivened the world in the painting is gone; what is left is not unlike a pictorial site of empirical and affective remnants. A true connoisseur demonstrates his insight by abstracting from the remnants the “structure of feeling,” so to speak, unique to the bygone time, all the while acknowledging the irretrievability of that time.153
Vacillating between material contact and affective response, evidential verification and subsidiary awareness, Shen was trying out approaches to what would become a lyrical archaeology. A lyrical archaeologist’s task is to visit the artistic and textual constructs/remains, understand the historical turbulences that gave rise to the symptoms of such sentiment, and decipher the way they have been encapsulated, and dissipated, in abstract forms.154 But the late forties marked only the beginning of Shen’s pursuit. As explained in the following chapters, he would undergo a drastic psychological and ideological trial before coming to grasp the terms of his lyrical project.
“The Lyrical” and “the Epic”: Jaroslav Průšek
My third case of “inventing the lyrical tradition” in this epic period concerns Jaroslav Průšek, one of the most important Sinologists in mid-twentieth-century Europe. Průšek started Chinese studies with Bernhard Karlgren (1889–1978) in 1928. Between 1932 and 1937, Průšek took a trip to East Asia and made the acquaintance of writers and scholars such as Lu Xun, Bing Xin 冰心 (1900–1999), Shen Congwen, and Zheng Zhenduo 鄭振鐸 (1898–1958) during his two-year sojourn in China.155 This experience profoundly influenced his career, as vividly attested by his memoir My Sister China (1941). After his return to Prague in 1937, Průšek worked with Bohumil Mathesius (1888–1952), a Czech poet influenced by Chinese lyrical imagery and rhapsody, and they produced a series of readers of classical Chinese poetry. Meanwhile, Průšek took an interest in vernacular narrative fiction and other genres. By the end of the Second World War, he had become a leader of the younger generation of Czech Sinologists.156
In 1957, Průšek published “Subjectivism and Individualism in Modern Chinese Literature,” which laid the groundwork for his lyrical approach. He begins with the claim that modern Chinese literature “following the First World War and the Manchu period” is first and foremost characterized by a subjective and individualistic turn:
The artist sees in production above all the opportunity to express his views, feelings, sympathy or maybe hate; in extreme cases a work of art may provide the means for expressing, developing and finding scope for those aspects of his personality which in real life are somehow suppressed or not given full play. The work of art then, does not document objective reality but rather reflects the author’s inner life and comprises descriptions or analysis of his own feelings, moods, visions and even dreams; the artist’s work approaches more and more closely to a confessional in which the author reveals the different sides of his character and of his life—especially the gloomier and more hidden sides.157
Průšek proceeds to discuss works ranging from Lu Xun’s essays to Hu Shi’s autobiography, from Yu Dafu’s confessional writings to Ding Ling’s rebellious fiction. He concludes that, despite their differences in generic traits, sociopolitical vocations, and personal temperaments, these writers share the same subjective inclination, which he calls the lyrical.
At first look, Průšek appears to have recapitulated the conventional wisdom on the May Fourth tradition, seeing it as charged with high-strung sentimentalism and a radical individualistic proclivity. What makes Průšek different is his belief that modern Chinese writers’ subjective and individualistic inclination comes not from recently imported Western Romanticism as much as from the lyricism of premodern Chinese literature. This lyrical inclination, according to him, permeates the poetic articulations from ancient times, but as time moves on, it manifests increasingly in other genres, from narrative fiction to epistolary writing, diary, and autobiography. When (classical-style) poetry declined in the modern era, narrative fiction became the major vehicle through which the lyrical feeling was expressed.
Although Průšek’s essay is easily subject to critical scrutiny, many issues it raises, such as literary history versus revolutionary paradigm and world literature versus national heritage, still concern us today. By tracing the “origin” of modern Chinese subjectivism and individualism to its indigenous, premodern roots, Průšek challenges the popular view that equates Chinese literary modernization with Westernization. His valorization of the Chinese lyrical heritage in modern literature prompts a rethinking of the linear, progressive plotting of literary development. For him, one should never overlook the mutual illumination of past and present. Průšek’s agenda was provocative in his time, particularly if one considers his allegiance to leftism. Presumably he should have endorsed the linear timeline of (literary) revolution and upheld the inevitable overcoming of the old by the new.158
Průšek nominates the “lyrical” as the core of Chinese literature, even though History was demanding a progression in the “epic” direction. To begin with, he takes up the issue of the lyrical versus the epic as part of his overview of world literature. He contends that the Chinese lyric constitutes the “main form of artistic expression of the Chinese people,” a genre that “alone out of the whole world literature can occupy a place among the peak creations of world literature, alongside the Greek epic, Shakespeare’s plays, and the Russian novel.”159 Průšek bases his comment on two theoretical preambles. Linguistically, he notices that the phonetic makeup, grammatical rules, and rhythmic construct of the Chinese language all favor the composition of lyrical poetry, a genre that highlights the “static” configuration of experience, as opposed to the epic, which renders the “dynamic” view of humanity.160 Conceptually, he holds that lyrical poetry is a kind of “subjective poetry”:161 “The lyric occupies the foremost place in the literary output of the old Chinese man of letters. … To a certain extent, the essay, too, has a lyrical quality in its descriptions of natural scenery and personal experiences and feelings.”162 By contrast, “the form of epic or drama presents the phenomena of the outer world, objective reality and events.”163 These statements make him sound as if echoing, however unlikely, Chen Shih-hsiang, who was promoting Chinese “lyrical tradition” in North America almost at the same time.
One can quickly point out the shortcomings of Průšek’s observation. His investigation of the linguistic attributes of Chinese lyric poetry betrays an ontological fallacy; his definition of Chinese lyrical poetry as a totally subjective, static expression suggests the Orientalist fascination of the nineteenth-century European Romantic discourse—particularly in the Czech vein.164 Although Průšek’s postulations are debatable, more noteworthy is the way he looks into concrete cases, bringing about unexpected insights regarding the genesis of modern Chinese literature. I will discuss three aspects of his perspective.
First, despite his conception that the lyrical reflects the subjective and intentional, Průšek calls attention to a unique dimension of classical Chinese poetry: Chinese poets are able to extract from individual expressions a dimension pertaining to universal reflection. In “Some Marginal Notes on the Poems of Po Chü-i [Bai Juyi]” (1958), Průšek argues that while writing mainly in response to the social dynamics of his time, Bai Juyi is able to convey a worldly concern in personal terms: “Alongside and in contrast to the depicting of reality stands a poet who observes this reality, reflects on it, feels, evaluates and passes judgment upon it, whose ripples of feeling give the picture he presents its emotional coloring.”165 The secret, for Průšek, has to do with the lyrical mode Bai Juyi dwells on; his “poem aimed to be a kind of essence of distillation of thousands of similar experiences of Nature, just as with a painter’s picture. This method taught the artist to pick out what was typical in every phenomenon and, by reducing it to its most essential traits, to express its substance as concisely as possible.”166
Průšek’s comment may again seem a mere generalization; for one thing, not all Chinese lyrical poets are committed to situating individual emotions in a social context. Still, he touches on one characteristic of Chinese poetics, that poetry can and should enact feelings in reverberation with external mutations, from the social to the cosmic. The classical connotation of qing/feeling as a convergence of inner feelings and outer circumstances is relevant here. Following his political agenda, however, Průšek quickly streamlines Chinese lyricism in socialist terms. He cites in the same article Bai Juyi’s poem “Maitan weng” 賣炭翁 (Old charcoal seller) as using “a basic lyrical ground-plan” to facilitate a narrative about social misery and injustice: “on the one hand, objective reality, on the other, the personal experience.” Little surprise that his discussion should culminate in the poetry of Du Fu, the arch-“poet-historian” of Chinese poetry.167
This leads to my second point. Průšek calls the historical motivation embedded in Chinese literature “epic,” in the sense that it aims to witness the social dynamics on a panoramic, realist scale. Just as with the term “lyric,” he invokes “epic” by recourse to Western models. This “epic” is said to be grounded in the collective, vernacular experience traceable as far back as the Homeric tradition, its most recent incarnation being the realist novel as exercised by writers from Balzac to Tolstoy. As Průšek would have it, although Chinese literature has no epic tradition, one can still tease out the “epic” sensibility ingrained in lyrical poetry thanks to its “synthetic” vision of the individual and the world. The cases of Bai Juyi and Du Fu testify to the Chinese poet’s bent to “present in a single synthetic picture a certain unique reality, bringing out its general features and universal validity, and at the same time express his own feelings and judgments in relation to it.”168 In other words, through Průšek’s comparative prism, the arguable drawback in Chinese literature—lack of the epic genre and its variations—turns out to be something unique and praiseworthy: both the “lyrical” and the “epic” are said to be encapsulated in the individualistic expression of lyrical poetry.
There is another twist in Průšek’s “epic” appropriation of the Chinese lyrical tradition. Průšek had developed an interest in vernacular narrative since the late thirties, particularly the huaben, or storytelling account. In view of its popular roots and ambiance of life performance, he believes that the storytelling narrative is where the epic momentum lies in Chinese literature. As he puts it, the “lively oral narration, with all the artistic devices of the storyteller’s art—turns of speech, broad epic description and the dramatic and direct appeal of the artist,” has exerted an enormous impact on the Chinese imaginary of reality.169 Through the interaction present in the act of storytelling, a community is presumably brought together to enjoy a shared sense of history on the move. If Průšek’s discovery sounds familiar, it may be because it recalls Walter Benjamin’s description of the storyteller in the Western oral tradition,170 which in turn is a leftist modification of the Romantic view on folk narrative. But there is one fundamental difference: for all its representation of social life at large, the Chinese storytelling narrative always embraces a lyrical core, as evinced by the frequent interpolation of poems in the narrative sequence. For Průšek, these poems not only “supplement the characterization of certain persons or happenings, but still more generalize these features, giving them a universal and often typical quality.”171 Accordingly, huaben tales are a “lyrico-epic” type of stories.172
At this juncture, Průšek comes very close to Chen Shih-hsiang. Both suggest that the lyrical constitutes the essence of Chinese literary expressions regardless of generic attributes and historical motivations, and both try to highlight this lyrical characteristic as China is brought to face the impacts of world literature. However, they are addressing very different ideological and critical premises. Chen seeks to retrieve the lyrical as a way to critique the aftermath of modern projects, particularly the Chinese Communist Revolution. By contrast, Průšek considers the lyrical the key to enforcing Chinese revolutionary modernity. Whereas Chen derives his lyrical vision from both the New Critical and modernist discourses and the philological tradition of Chinese studies, Průšek launches his lyrico-epic investigation in light of the Czech Romantic tradition, the Prague structuralist doctrine, and the Marxist revolutionary agenda.
This leads to my third point, which concerns the comparative literary heritage of Průšek’s Chinese lyrical learning. Leonard Chan has pointed out Průšek’s ties to the Bohemian vein of Romanticism.173 Such a yearning for the Czech lyrical induces an Orientalist counterpart. Rudolf Dvořák (1860–1920) and Jaroslav Vrchlický (1853–1912), for instance, jointly translated the Classic of Poetry into Czech, considering it one of the best works of world lyrical poetry. They were followed by the poet Bohumil Mathesius, who translated/re-created classical Chinese poetry and collaborated with Průšek on their series of Chinese poetry readers.174 Moreover, Průšek belongs to the Prague circle of linguistic studies. His analysis of the linguistic structure of the Chinese lyric bespeaks his familiarity with the methodology of Prague structuralism.175 Concepts he refers to, such as artistic structure, composition, and social and aesthetic functions, all show imprints of the scholarship of Jan Mukařovský (1891–1975), a leading member of the Prague structuralist school and a colleague of Průšek’s at Charles University.176 Průšek’s emphasis on the lyrical as the unique feature of Chinese literature also brings to mind the function of “literariness,” a highlight of the Prague linguists’ (and by association, Russian formalists’) literary studies.177
Meanwhile, one has to consider Průšek’s commitment to the Marxist-Leninist revolution.178 The ideological side of Průšek leads him to see Chinese literature moving toward the epic form in the interest of collective subjectivity and revolutionary utopia. But he also contends that the lyrical is the integral component of Chinese language and literature, in spite of historical changes. This obliges him to continuously negotiate conflicting critical strategies. In a nutshell, Průšek’s “scientific” methodology refers to both the Prague structuralist doctrine and Marxist revolutionary dogma. The former enables him to identify the lyrical as the integral “device” in the “compositional structure” of Chinese literature; the latter makes the epic revelation of socialist solidarity the goal of any modern literary engagement. Průšek’s schemata become even more complex when put into practice, as in his Bai Juyi and Du Fu analysis. Whereas he describes the two poets as lyrico-epic models in the spirit of shishi or poet-historian, he is ready to submit their lyrico-epic capacity to the Marxist literary dialectic of typicality.
Průšek’s Sinological engagement with lyricism provides a perspective from which to view the lyrical criticisms in circulation in mid-twentieth-century North America and Europe. The following is a glance at some of the most prominent articulations at the time, not to render any conclusive comment but to ponder directions for further inquiry. First is the case of György Lukács (1885–1971). With European literature as his focus, Lukács considers in The Theory of the Novel that Western narrative originates with the epic, a genre that embodies an organic worldview of the human and the divine and a total harmony of interiority and exteriority. This epic tradition nevertheless suffered from a lyrical downturn in the Romantic period and continues to decline precipitously in modern times.179 As Lukács sees it, the lyrical, inward tendency of modern literature registers a disavowal of human subjectivity vis-à-vis the wholesome existence of the world. The Theory of the Novel was first published in 1915, and Lukács’ thought went through major changes in the subsequent decades. Still, as late as 1959, he deplored the “lyricization” of Western (literary) history, regarding the subjectivity of the lyrical novel as nothing but “one soul and the action merely longing for that soul.”180
As discussed above, Průšek’s 1957 essay valorizes the lyrical as the key to the epic magnitude of modern subjectivity; his thesis therefore seems to contradict Lukács’s. Whereas Lukács suspects that modern lyricism epitomizes the degeneration of Western civilization, Průšek finds in the Chinese lyrical “one of the symptoms of the emancipation of the individual from the feudal traditions.”181 The irony, however, is that they may not be as far apart as they appear. Their different intellectual agendas notwithstanding, both critics share the yearning to reinstate the epic world, and to that end, both entertain the Romantic motif of the epic world as one of affective plenitude and semantic immanence. In a peculiar way, Průšek could have cited Chinese lyricism, thanks to its built-in lyrico-epic potential, as a remedy where its Western counterpart, in Lukács’s opinion, falls short.
Here one may recall Walter Benjamin’s account of the storyteller as opposed to the modern lyricist. Benjamin contends that the storyteller is the pivotal figure who lends meaning to the life of a traditional society. Through his travel from one place to another as well as his recounting of events of bygone ages, the storyteller is said to be able to call forth a sense of communion among his audiences of different walks, ages, and classes. He may be a medium of and witness to collective subjectivity. By contrast, a modern lyricist like Charles Baudelaire has lost the capacity to tell his story. Instead of a coherent vision of what the world should be, Baudelaire conveys fragmentary vignettes and fleeting sensations of a life he observes as a flâneur; instead of exercising unifying power, like the storyteller, Baudelaire “placed the shock experience at the very center of his artistic world,”182 and his literary endeavors become part of a defense against the shocks and constant mutability of modern life. “Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents.”183
Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) takes off where Benjamin concludes. In 1957, the same year Průšek published “Subjectivism and Individualism in Modern Chinese Literature,” Adorno published “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” For Adorno, although lyrical poetry stresses individual and subjective consciousness, the genre can still play a critical function in modern society. He contends that the social formation of lyric poetry determines that it registers a “break” and “rupture” of the individual from the collective, the subjective consciousness from the material world; “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism,” because “a collective understanding provides the foundation for all individual poetry.”184 Insofar as it instantiates both the malaise of a society and its antidote, Adorno argues, lyrical poetry inscribes critically not only what our social experience is like but also what it fails to be like. “In the lyric poem the subject, through its identification with language, negates both its opposition to society as something merely monadological and its mere functioning within a wholly socialized society.”185
Here is a clue to a potential dialogue between Průšek and Adorno. Both refuse to look at the relationship between poetry and society in simplified, mimetic terms. Much has been discussed about Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” through which the critic redefines the intricate relationships between modernist cultural and literary production and socialist yearning. Accordingly, one is always encouraged to look into the lacunae of a lyrical articulation; only through the dialectic arising between the lines can one discern its critical potential in play.186 Whereas Adorno looks into the agency of negative dialectics in modernist lyricism, Průšek tries to revitalize the synthetic power of premodern Chinese lyrical poetry. For him, even if Chinese literature proceeds inevitably toward the epic revelation, the lyrical ethos arising therefrom does not serve as its estranged other but rather provides cohesive power, endowing Chinese social subjectivity with a “synthetic” capacity of its own. The mutual implication of the lyrical and the epic can exemplify the “singular plural” socialist vision.187
Průšek’s criticism need not be assessed only from the leftist angle. It may equally inspire a review of lyrical voices from the other end of the mid-century political spectrum. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), for instance, is known to have taken a “poetic turn” in the thirties, and he carried on his contemplation of the meaning of poetry well into the fifties. At the risk of oversimplification, let it be understood that Heidegger envisages that Western philosophy began with a brief time of authentic “openness to Being,” followed by a long period increasingly dominated by the forgetting of this initial openness. The degeneration of Western metaphysics into nihilism bespeaks such a process. To restore the openness, Heidegger proposes a turn to the sphere of poetry, as demonstrated by the works of Hölderlin and Rilke, among others, and argues for a poetic language that could unveil the fractured condition of the world, dismantle the “framing” brought by technology, and point to the state of lyrical fecundity.188
Paul de Man (1919–1983) started his career in wartime Europe and then moved to the United States, and eventually became a leading figure of deconstructionism. In a series of essays in the sixties, de Man looks into the paradoxical twist in language and representation.189 His stress on intralinguistic reference and repetition enables him to deconstruct the relation between modernity and history. With the lyric as his point of reference, he suggests that literary modernity comes as a repeated attempt to achieve the spontaneity of action that is outside time and history, only to end up exposing such an attempt always already implicated in the historical flux that is a series of allegorical recessions.190 In “Lyric and Modernity,” de Man argues that poetic language is “representational and nonrepresentational at the same time.” Moreover, he adds that
All representational poetry is always also allegorical, whether it be aware of it or not, and the allegorical power of the language undermines and obscures the specific literal meaning of a representation open to understanding. But all allegorical poetry must contain a representational element that invites and allows for understanding, only to discover that the understanding it reaches is necessarily in error.191 (italics mine)
Heidegger’s and de Man’s poetic theories, to be sure, lead to very different conclusions. Heidegger is yearning for the human “dwelling poetically in the world”; de Man acknowledges the despair of the moment of recognition that pure lyric subjectivity is illusory. Judged by Průšek’s agenda of the “lyrical” and the “epic,” the cases of Heidegger and de Man bring about a different kind of tension regarding poetry and lived historical experience. These two thinkers take up the metaphorical power of language, either mythifying or demythifying it, in negotiating—and negating—the epic conditions of their time, including political experience and ethical judgment. Poetry is treated either as a vehicle suggesting that which is beyond the boundary of metaphysics192 or as an alibi for textual relativism and the infinite regression of meaning.193 Both critics strive to do away with history, only to betray the “historical disquiet” beneath their tasks. Heidegger endorsed Nazi propaganda; his advocacy for a language that transcends the bonding of “the earth,” “opening up” that which has been obscured by the humanistic tradition, appeared at a time when millions of social and ethnic misfits perished in a most unpoetic way. Four years after his passing, de Man was exposed: when in Belgium in the early 1940s, he had been a fervent contributor to a pro-Nazi newspaper in favor of collaboration and anti-Semitism.
Finally, the imaginary dialogue between Průšek and New Criticism. In 1947, Cleanth Brooks published The Well-wrought Urn, which offers a close reading of celebrated English poems by poets from Shakespeare to Yeats. Brooks makes in the final chapter and appendices a strong argument against the “heresy of paraphrase” because it risks explaining away the gist of poetry in terms of narrative.194 The book represents the climax of his studies since Understanding Poetry and Modern Poetry and the Tradition. It criticizes the historical/biographical discourse of studying poetry, proposing instead that a reader should concentrate on the texture of a work as such, so as to discern its inherent quality of excellence. Accordingly, poetry should be treated as a self-contained entity, a “well-wrought urn.”
At his most polemical, Brooks valorizes the poetic over the historical, or in our terms, the lyrical over the epic, simply because he believes that poetry constructs a metaphysical order that neither historical experience nor affective aspiration can emulate. He stresses the suprahistorical—rather than nonhistorical—uniqueness of poetry. Průšek never had an opportunity to challenge Brooks. Nevertheless, he was involved in a well-known debate with C. T. Hsia, who studied with Brooks at Yale. In his review of Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961), Průšek criticizes Hsia for being biased against communist literature and sidestepping the scientific methodology of reading history: “the author is not capable of placing the literary phenomena of which he treats in the proper historical perspective, of showing their connection with the preceding development, or eventually bringing them into relation with world literature.”195 In his equally contentious rejoinder, Hsia faults Průšek with leftist dogmatism and intentional fallacy at the cost of the standard of aesthetic excellence and universal humanism.196
Although the lyric is not the stake of the Průšek-Hsia debate, it provides the subtext because, as discussed above, Průšek considers narrative fiction the modern venue where the lyrical meets the epic while Hsia, following Brooks, seeks in fiction a “value of excellence” epitomized otherwise by poetry of the most refined kind. Granting their ideological chasm, Průšek and Hsia could have had a more in-depth dialogue had they paid closer attention to each other’s critical genealogies. Průšek never would have meant to rule out individualism and subjectivism in toto, as long as a literary subjectivity evolves in resonance with communal desires; unlike most of his leftist peers, he never rejected the power of the lyrical in epic discourse. Likewise, Hsia would have been ready to appreciate a work committed to sociopolitical causes as long as its collective, epic vision allowed for individual, lyrical demand. In addition, Hsia’s critique of “obsession with China” is ingrained in historical concerns. My point, however, is not to vindicate either party. Rather, I would stress the fact that Průšek and Hsia’s debate makes more sense when understood in the context of comparative literature, and that their provocations represents the response of the Sinological sphere to the Western academic engagement with poetry and history in mid-twentieth-century and Cold War politics.
I have described three approaches to the lyrical in mid-twentieth-century China: Chen Shih-hsiang’s “lyrical tradition,” which valorizes the continuum of a lyrical sensibility throughout Chinese literature; Shen Congwen’s archaeology of “abstract lyricism,” which seeks to rescue humanity from modern atrocities by soliciting lyrical abstractions from figural as well as material artworks; and Průšek’s juxtaposition of the lyrical and the epic, which brings modern Chinese literature a renewed ideological and aesthetic polemic. In responding to the Western Romantic paradigm as well as revolutionary discourse, each sought a way to engage Chinese literary history. They demonstrate three directions that concerned modern Chinese literati and artists, particularly at the moment of mid-twentieth-century crisis: first, the dialogic between xing and yuan, or the ever rejuvenating evocation of a fresh world and the figural recapitulation of a world already in a diminished existence; second, the dialogic between qing and wu, or between the testimony to affections and the instantiation of materiality; third, the dialogic between shi 詩 and shi 史, or between the emanation of the poetic mind and the distillation of lyrico-epic experience. With these critical frameworks, we turn to the book’s first chapter.