The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists Through the 1949 Crisis

“THE LYRICAL” IS PERHAPS one of the least likely terms to be associated with China in the mid-twentieth century. This period witnessed a succession of crises: the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Civil War, the national split in 1949 and the resulting exodus of millions of Chinese, and the campaigns in New China, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. The magnitude of the tumult was such that to focus on the lyrical in this period has been dismissed as anachronistic and self-indulgent.

However, I contend that precisely because the mid-twentieth century in China was characterized by national cataclysms and mass movements, all of which brought drastic changes to Chinese lives, this period helps bring into view the extraordinary work of Chinese lyricism at its most intense. Lyricism in Chinese literary culture has always implicated an interaction between the self and the world, and during this period there emerged waves of literary and artistic practices that sought to identify individual options in the face of the atrocities. Lyricism can be seen as a poetics of selfhood that informs the historical moment and helps define Chinese modernity in a different light.

The writers, artists, and intellectuals discussed in this book could hardly be called a unified group: they were liberals, leftists, conservatives, revolutionaries, collaborators, ideological converts, and self-styled individualists. They expressed themselves in recourse to a variety of media forms such as poetry, fiction, intellectual treatise, political manifesto, cinema, theater, painting, calligraphy, and above all, music. For all their divergent backgrounds and commitments, they each invoked the “lyrical” as they came to ruminate on the stakes of selfhood vis-à-vis solidarity, pondering historical contingencies and poetic/artistic assertions and experimenting with forms that they believed best cast light on and responded to the time of crisis.

Why did these literary and cultural figures feel impelled to address lyricism at a time when action at an epic scale seemed more urgently in order? What constituted the lyrical discourse of the time? More pertinently, what is the relevance of such a lyrical calling of the past century to our time? These are the questions that this book intends to explore. Accordingly, the title, The Lyrical in Epic Time, takes me beyond the more predictable “the lyrical in an epic time” to describe the overarching implications of the figures under discussion: their provocations and articulatory “tonalities,” their experimentations in reaction to historical tempos. Here “the lyrical” and “the epic” are inspired by the way Jaroslav Průšek (1906–1980) used them,1 pointing to not only a genre or style that informed a literary culture² but also a set of values or a “structure of feeling” that registered a social episteme.³

Through a constellation of figures, genres, and approaches, I seek to map out the multiple strains of lyrical representation during this period, and contemplate their significances with regard to contemporary China. These chapters share two thematic interventions. First, the lyrical discourse helps me rethink the sufficiency of the extant paradigm of Chinese modernity, which is largely dominated by the double claims of revolution and enlightenment. I seek to triangulate the paradigm by arguing that revolution can be powered by both political action and poetic provocation, and that enlightenment can have an impact only when charged with creative sensibilities. Such a lyrical discourse, however, also carries the perfidious symptoms of its time. These include a cluster of tensions rarely touched on in traditional poetics: betrayal and brutality are seen as exchangeable with expressive sincerity, ideological fanaticism evokes an unlikely resonance with idyllic yearning. Above all, lyricism begets its own disavowal, in terms of self-abjuration, suicide, and silence.

In view of the highly contested motivations and practices inherent in lyricism during this period, I am aware that I may have raised more questions than I can answer in one book. As a matter of fact, critical voices have already been heard from China and elsewhere. To the critics who worry that I am “depoliticizing” the Chinese revolutionary heart, I suggest that the depoliticized status quo results more from the entropy of the originary, lyrical momentum of revolution: Didn’t Marx suggest that revolution cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future?4 To critics who worry that I am deviating from the great “lyrical tradition,” I propose that we understand tradition not as a great chain of being but as a succession of inventions, anti-inventions, and reinventions. Above all, I am not promoting lyricism/shuqing as a new magic formula for modern Chinese literary and intellectual studies. Instead, I treat it as a critical interface through which more soundings about Chinese (post)modernity can be heard in reverberation.

TO FURTHER MY OBSERVATION, I would like to reflect more on the extant paradigm of modern Chinese literary and cultural studies. First, as suggested above, the master narrative of Chinese literary and cultural history of the past century has been dominated by “revolution” and “enlightenment.”5 This paradigm is charged with a strong sense of historical relevance and political urgency; its impact is evinced by an array of scholarship on subjects from the Literary Revolution to the Cultural Revolution, and then to the postsocialist revolution. But if revolution and enlightenment presuppose the agency of a modern subjectivity, the question of how such a subjectivity demonstrates its capacity to feel, and be felt about, with regard to either political action or epistemological pursuits should not be overlooked.

To be sure, modern Chinese literature and artworks of the past century are not short of representations of interior aspirations and turbulences. From ideological fanaticism to sentimental outpouring, from decadent self-abandon to cynical escapade, they are saturated with a wide variety of feelings and expressions. But we have yet to see a discourse about how subjectivity expresses, acquires, and critiques feelings and emotions as nuanced as that ascribed to the studies of either revolution or enlightenment.

That literary scholars and critics are shying away from the polemics of feeling/qing 情 may reflect a predilection toward what Yü-sheng Lin calls the “cultural-intellectualistic approach,” which favors a holistic understanding and solution of Chinese crisis merely at the level of intellectual deliberation.⁶ Above all, it betrays a conformism to the prevalent “strong” thought of modernity.⁷ This “strong” mode of thinking originated in the late Qing and May Fourth era and reached its apex during the Maoist regime, as illustrated by the mandate of nation building and the demands of volition, reason, collectivity, virility, and revolution. Rhetorically, it manifested in macroscopic (hongguan 宏觀) imagery, the “sublime figure,”⁸ and the “epic” representational system such as daguo 大國 (great nation) and tianxia 天下 (under heaven). By contrast, the lyrical comes across simply as too weak and trivial to carry the weight of modernity’s demands.⁹

But the accomplishments of Chinese writers and artists are not necessarily subject to such a critical assumption. For instance, Lu Xun’s 魯迅 “call to arms” or “wandering” does not bring out merely his revolutionary fervor; it touches readers’ hearts also because it unveils the master’s disturbed psyche resonating with works from the Chuci 楚辭 (Songs of the south) to Leonid Andryev’s fiction. Whereas Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) comes to terms with his treason by recourse to Japanese aesthetics and Chinese hermetism, Qu Qiubai 瞿秋白 (1899–1935) acts out his martyrdom by recapitulating not only revolutionary altruism but also the Buddhist notion of self-annihilation.¹⁰ Even Mao Zedong 毛澤東 derives his charisma as much from his revolutionary feats as from his poetic provocations.¹¹ His lyrical bent brought him to express in classical-style Chinese song lyrics and poems his remembrances of personal loss, his musings on historical vicissitudes, and his ecstasy when likening all citizens under his rule to the ancient sage kings Shun and Yao immersed in the spring breeze.¹²

A truly “strong” mode of thinking is by logic resilient enough to embrace rather than reject the multiple expressions of humanity. At the core of a revolutionary action often resides a most tender yearning for a “singular plural” utopia.13 The renowned contemporary Chinese thinker Li Zehou 李澤厚 (b. 1929) pointed out in the 1980s that Chinese modernity is motivated by two causes, “enlightenment” (qimeng 啓蒙) and “national salvation” (jiuwang 救亡).¹⁴ Li’s observation has been regarded as most influential in reshaping the post-Mao discourse. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that Li at the same time urged the new generation of Chinese to resuscitate their ganxing 感性, or affective and aesthetic sensibilities, as a complement to and critique of the causes and consequences of enlightenment and revolution.¹⁵ At the turn of the new century, Li even proposed that the “original substance of feeling” or qingbenti 情本體 be the impetus for China’s continued search for postsocialist subjectivity.¹⁶ Li’s “emotive turn” may appear to be a retreat from the front line of the socialist project. But for someone whose ideology is grounded in Marxism and whose reputation arose from the “Great Debate Over Aesthetics” with the Crocean aesthetician Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛 (1897–1986) and dogmatic Marxist aesthetician Cai Yi 蔡儀 (1906–1992) in the late fifties,¹⁷ Li has come a long way to where he now stands.¹⁸ Li proclaims that, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, one must rethink the insufficiencies of “revolution” and “enlightenment,” and that without reflecting on and cultivating qing,¹⁹ Chinese subjectivity cannot be fashioned anew. Li’s theoretical eclecticism—including at least Marxian humanism, Kantian aesthetics, and Confucianism—has incited debates.²⁰ He nevertheless found an unlikely echo when the Chinese government made “harmonious society” (hexie shehui 和諧社會) its goal in 2005 and when President Xi Jinping called for a “Chinese dream” (zhongguo meng 中國夢) in 2013, as if even the socialist machine were trying to reconstitute its power through a lyrical evocation of (Confucian/socialist) harmony and dream.²¹

My second point pertains to the extant model of critiquing interiority versus exteriority in modern Chinese literature and culture. More than half a century ago, C. T. Hsia described Chinese literature as marked by an “obsession with China.” Hsia holds that modern Chinese literati are so obsessed by national crises as to turn their repugnance for the status quo into a masochistic exercise; that is, they want to “possess” any given social and political malaise as something unique to China, thus grappling with Chinese modernity negatively by denouncing it.22 Hsia’s critique has been supplemented by critics from different angles. Rey Chow takes note of the “primitive passions” in Chinese textual and visual culture, by which she means that Chinese writers and filmmakers tend to invoke the human and natural imagery of the raw and underprivileged, thereby flaunting the deprived conditions of China’s encounter with the modern.²³ Jing Tsu simply names the complex of “failure” a paradoxical symptom of modern Chinese identity politics.²⁴ In contrast, whereas Marston Anderson and Eugenia Lean discuss “sympathy” in personal and popular domains respectively,²⁵ Haiyan Lee calls attention to the causes and effects of the “revolution of the heart,”²⁶ and Gloria Davies discovers among contemporary Chinese intellectuals, neoleftists, and neoliberals alike the syndrome of “worrying about China.”²⁷ More noticeable is Ban Wang’s study of the “sublime figure” as “a discursive dynamic, a psychic mechanism, a stunning figure, a grand image of the body, or a crushing and uplifting experience from the lowest depression to the highest picture. By these processes and images, whatever smacks too much of the human creature—appetite, feeling, sensibility, sensuality, imagination, fear, passion, lust, self-interest, etc.—is purged and repressed so that the all-too-human is sublimated into the superhuman and even inhuman realms.“²⁸

These analyses, observant and provocative as they are, derive their theoretical premises primarily from Western discourses on subjectivity, psychoanalysis, and affect. One can argue that, insofar as the discipline of “modern Chinese literature” came into existence as a mixture of foreign and indigenous sources, there is no need to solicit Chinese essentialism at the theoretical level. Still, it is impossible to overlook the uneven development of discursive agency, with Western theory taking precedence over Chinese subjects (and subjectivities), in academia. When speaking of the dynamics of the modern Chinese mindscape, it has become customary to refer to the theories developed by critics from Agamben to Zižek, chief among whom are Freud and Foucault. But how often have propositions such as Lu Xun’s “Power of the Mara Poet” (Moluo shili 摩羅詩力), Zhang Taiyan’s 章太炎 (1869–1936) “grand individuality” (dadu 大獨) and “subjectivity under erasure” (wuwo zhiwo 無我之我),²⁹ Zhu Guangqian’s “serenity” (jingmu 靜穆),³⁰ and Hu Feng’s 胡風 (1902–1985) “subjective fighting spirit” (zhuguan de zhandou jingshen 主觀的戰鬥精神) been brought up to facilitate a diacritical investigation? Whereas Benjaminian “flâneurs” are said to have roamed the Chinese land, Hu Lancheng’s 胡蘭成 (1906–1981) “vagabond” (dangzi 蕩子),³¹ however relevant to the Chinese circumstances, has gone into eclipse. Foucauldean “archaeology” has been widely welcomed over the past decades, but Shen Congwen’s 沈從文 (1902–1988) “lyrical archaeology” (shuqing kaoguxue 抒情考古學) remains obscure to most literature majors.³²

Contrary to the common wisdom that the May Fourth era was a period of total antitraditionalism, intellectuals and literati at the time appear to have been radical comparatists when analyzing modern foreign importations as well as traditional Chinese legacies. For example, his indebtedness to Nietzsche and Stirner aside, Lu Xun expresses his modernist angst by revisiting the abysmal pathos of both Qu Yuan 屈原 (340–278 B.C.) and Tao Qian 陶潛 (395–427).33 Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927) strives to cope with his existential crisis in terms of not only Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s philosophy but also the “mental vista” (jingjie 境界) originating with Buddhist thought. Zhu Guangqian’s career path takes him from Nietzsche to Croce, Marx, and Vico, all the while pondering how to modernize the time-honored concept “fusion of feeling and scene” (qingjing jiaorong 情景交融).³⁴ Once immersed in German Idealist philosophy, Zong Baihua 宗白華 (1897–1986) develops his own aesthetics by bridging Kantian and Hegelian premises with the tenets of the I-Jing, Chinese music, architecture, and landscape painting.³⁵ Others who engage with both the Chinese lyrical legacy and Western sources include critics such as Li Jianwu 李健吾 (1906–1982) and Li Changzhi 李長之 (1910–1978), fiction writers such as Fei Ming 廢名 (1901–1967) and Shen Congwen, and poets such as Bian Zhilin 卞之琳 (1910–2000) and Liang Zongdai 梁宗岱 (1903–1983).

Let there be no misunderstanding that twentieth-century Chinese lyrical poetics appeal only to cultural conservatives. In Lu Xun pipan 魯迅批判 (A critique of Lu Xun, 1936), arguably the first full-length book on Lu Xun criticism in modern China, Li Changzhi points out that Lu Xun is a poet by nature despite his revolutionary posture, and that he is most compelling and polemical when writing in a lyrical style.36 Li’s critique exerted a profound impact on Takeuchi Yoshimi’s famous Lu Xun (1944), which holds that the core of Lu Xun’s revolutionary politics is his “conversion” to literature of the most amorphous and subtle kind.³⁷ Among the leftists, Hu Feng’s avant-garde undertaking is said to carry the imprint of both the Mencian thought of the Mind and György Lukács’ Hegelian/Marxian revolutionism;³⁸ Ai Qing’s 艾青 (1910–1996) treatise on poetry is substantiated by his admiration for the poetics of both Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) and Bai Juyi 白居易 (772–846);³⁹ Lu Ling’s 路翎 (1923–1994) Caizhu di ernümen 財主底兒女們 (Children of the rich, 1946–1948) entertains a dialogue between revolutionary Bildungsroman and the Dream of the Red Chamber; Sun Li’s 孫犁 (1913–2002) portrait of revolutionary peasantry partakes of a pastoral style at its most tender. Nevertheless, how to modulate qing/feeling in a revolutionary context has always been a contentious subject within the leftist camp. Xu Chi 徐遲 (1914–1996), for instance, claimed in 1939 that a politically engaged poet should “exile lyricism” (fangzhu shuqing 放逐抒情) so as to forestall the demoralizing threat of sentiments. Interestingly, Xu came to celebrate “political lyricism” (zhengzhi shuqing 政治抒情) in 1959, likening it to the genre of ode (song 頌) in classics such the Classic of Poetry and the Songs of the South.⁴⁰

WITH THESE OBSERVATIONS, we turn to the structure of the book. The introduction lays out my thesis: that we need to develop a discourse that can truly speak to the complex trajectories of modern Chinese affections and sensibilities vis-à-vis a tumultuous time. I propose that, beyond the extant scholarship on the modern Chinese reception of Western lyricism, an inquiry into shuqing can provide a new prism through which to develop such a discourse. It highlights the interplay between classical Chinese poetics and modern theories, pointing to a conspicuous lacuna in current modern Chinese literary and cultural studies. I focus on three figures who each presented a lyrical theory in response to the mid-twentieth-century crisis in China: Chen Shih-hsiang 陳世驤 (1912–1971) in the United States, Shen Congwen in China, and Jaroslav Průšek in Czechoslovakia.

The following eight chapters are divided into two interrelated parts. Part I (chapters 1–4) focuses on the poetics of the lyrical, with reference to various literary genres, particularly poetry and prose. Part II (chapters 5–8) focuses on the aesthetics of the lyrical by drawing examples from music, film, theater, painting, and calligraphy. It is my intention to look at lyricism across disparate literary and artistic forms, treating it not merely as a literary genre but as a dynamics of intellectual and artistic culture in modern China. And it is my hope that this book can help us rethink the critical potential of the Chinese lyrical in cross-generic and interdisciplinary terms.

Chapter 1 provides a critical reflection on the genesis of modern Chinese lyrical poetics from the turn of the modern century to the first decade of the New China. I introduce a variety of enunciative endeavors, ranging from avant-garde experiments to ideological treatises, Western importations, and classical Chinese inspirations, that have informed the discourse of modern Chinese lyricism, and observe the historical factors affecting their interplay.

Chapter 2 deals with Shen Congwen’s pursuit of “abstract lyricism” through “lyrical archaeology” from the 1940s to the 1960s. By describing what I call his three epiphanies, I ask how Shen reconciled his lyrical vision with the mandate of socialist materialism. I also look into the motivations that compelled Shen to dedicate the last part of his career to Chinese costume history. Through examining thousands of pieces of classical Chinese fabrics and garments, Shen managed to weave his discoveries of abstraction and materiality, fabrication and history, into a unique narrative tapestry of qing/feeling.

Chapter 3 discusses the metamorphosis of Feng Zhi 馮至 (1905–1993) and He Qifeng 何其芳 (1912–1977), two of the most important modernist poets, during the 1940s and 1950s in terms of “born-again” lyricism. Its religious implications notwithstanding, “born-again” in this context projects the poets’ immanent search for self-renewal in the vein of both modernism and revolutionism. I suggest that for all their newfound belief, they could not resist a lyrical flight out of the set ideological trajectory. The rupture thus born (again) refers not only to the caesuras—pauses of a poetic utterance occasioned by metric and affective need—that punctuate their writing, but also to the aporias—unintended fissures that subvert the wholesomeness of a discourse or composition—that underlie their vocation.

Chapter 4 discusses the equivocal phenomenon Hu Lancheng, former husband of Eileen Chang 張愛玲 (1920–1995), and collaborator during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Despite his political and personal infidelity, Hu was able to excuse himself, even winning popularity, via recourse to lyricism, a mode most often suggesting truthful expression of one’s innermost feelings. Hu’s case is an opportunity to explore whether he brings lyrical power to the full or merely reveals the inherent performative, hence duplicitous, nature of lyricism. Did Hu Lancheng betray lyricism, or demonstrate a lyricism of betrayal that marks one of the most debatable features of Chinese literary culture?

Chapter 5 describes the journey of Jiang Wenye 江文也 (1910–1983), the legendary Taiwanese composer and poet, in search of his Chinese identity: the artistic choice Jiang made during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the political consequences he had to cope with. Through select musical pieces, poetic works, and theoretical treatises, I explore how Jiang’s modernist sensibility demonstrates his colonial and cosmopolitan bearings; how his engagement with Confucian musicology brings about an unlikely dialogue between Chinese cultural essentialism and Japanese pan-Asianism; and most important, how his lyrical vision was occasioned by, and confined to, historical contingencies.

Chapter 6 features two giants in modern Chinese painting, Lin Fengmian 林風眠 (1900–1991) and Xu Beihong 徐悲鴻 (1895–1953). I describe how Lin Fengmian modernized Chinese painting through “lyricization,” as opposed to the realist campaign led by Xu Beihong, and investigate the discursive exchange between the two and its relevance to the literary field, in which a similar debate was taking place. Moreover, I look into the lyrical experimentation Lin undertook during the Second Sino-Japanese War and afterward, and suggest that his idiosyncratic pursuit brought a polemical thrust to Chinese art amid historical crisis. This change points to the dialectic between textual and visual re-form of reality and the political agency thus created.

Chapter 7 discusses the mutual illumination between Chinese opera and cinema on the eve of the Chinese Communist Revolution. I focus on two films made by the “poet-director” Fei Mu 費穆 (1906–1951) in 1948, Shengsihen 生死恨 (Eternal regret) and Xiaocheng zhichun 小城之春 (Spring in a small town). The former is an adaptation of the Peking opera of the same title, starring Mei Lanfang, 梅蘭芳 (1894–1961), the most popular female impersonator of traditional theater; the latter is a contemporary melodrama allegedly inspired by the song lyrics of Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037–1101). The two movies cannot be more different in style and background. But the fact that they both deal with wartime romance and were produced back to back points to something more than a coincidence. It tells a compelling story of how Fei, with the inspiration of Mei, negotiated a new way of screening China and offered a radical manifestation of cinematic “Chineseness” where it was least expected.

Chapter 8 tells of the artistic transition made by Tai Jingnong 臺靜農 (1902–1990) from literature to calligraphy amid mid-century crisis. I argue that by turning to the graphic “surface” rather than the textual depth of writing, Tai came to a different understanding of artistic agency and historical representation. Where literature betrays its finitude, the performance of writing generates new configurations of history, nationhood, and “Chinese” identity. The chapter addresses three issues: the dissemination of modern Chinese writing in visual terms; calligraphy and its geopolitical implications; and the poetics of “muted” Sinophone articulations.