Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian (review)

In this wide-ranging book, Xiaobing Tang interprets a string of seminal literary and film texts spanning the twentieth century. Part 1 covers literary texts of the late Qing and May Fourth periods and the controversial 1930s and 1940s. Part 2 discusses socialist literature and theater in the age of Mao, the inner dynamics of which heralded the appearance of some exciting motifs later. This second part deals as well with cultural and literary practices in the age of reform, the liberalization of the market economy, and the rise of consumer society. But the structural principle here is more interesting than an adherence to the received chronology of literary history. For scholars of modern Chinese literature it is always daunting to survey the overwhelming time-space of the twentieth century, with or without the aid of a chronological thread, but Tang finds a useful tool for delving into the huge mass of historical, discursive, and aesthetic material: the interplay between the heroic and the quotidian.

Chinese Modern is a refreshing inquiry into the contested notion of the modern and its related components and configurations in modern Chinese literature and film. In recent years, scholars have told stories of modern Chinese literature and film within a framework of modernity and modernization, be it Eurocentric, alternative, translated, or colonial. This book tells a different story of the Chinese modern, one that evolves around a central dilemma in China's quest for modernity: the dynamic tension between the heroic and the commonplace. As a conceptual design and a structural principle, this tension brings together the utopian yearnings of the political community and the private desire for fulfillment, the revolutionary passions and the domestic routines, the mass-culture spectacles and the self-absorbed aesthetics, and the impulse for transcendence and the retreat to everyday immanence. The heroic and the quotidian are the effective means by which the book reconfigures these forces and strains.

Tang tips the balance toward the quotidian. The heroic encompasses the momentous actions, theatrical spectacles, and epoch-making collective drives of modern China—the image of history in the classic Marxist sense. The quotidian looks the other way at the comforting nooks and crannies of quiet pleasure, domesticity, the intricate workings of the psyche, the satisfaction of desire, and daily commodity consumption. Even though the heroic generally ran roughshod over the quotidian for a whole tumultuous century—until the latter emerged as the new god of consumption—the quotidian in its tragic victimhood and resilient survival is bound to take on an aspect of the heroic on its own. It has a "revelatory desolation," possessing "its own beauty and grandeur" as part of "the heroism of modern life" (p. 5). It is a heroism lived from day to day, quietly, beneath the relentless march of political history.

The book reinstates a positive, if not quite heroic, everyday out of the grand heroism of the revolutionary and socialist periods. In studies of modern Chinese political culture, the reigning tendency is to see the political, social, and everyday realms as organized into a watertight apparatus dominated completely by official imperatives, policy, and symbols. The separation of the political from the social, which touches upon the everyday and the individual, is acknowledged only as a negative reaction to this totalistic apparatus, and is unlikely to be a prism for recovering a "real life" in the "past" of the socialist culture. Recognizing that there is a legitimate utopian desire for secular existence, cutting across both public and private realms, Tang is able to show that there was life, and much of it quite rich, in the alleged machinery of the state and in socialist mass culture. In other words, the everyday, although a secular rather than a political ideology in its own right, is treated with a serious appraisal and not just as an appendage of a bigger political and ideological framework.

One sign of the everyday is the primacy of the psyche...