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177 Chapter 8 Literary Politics and Cultural Heritage Modern Literature Museums About halfway through the 1964 film Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei; dir. Xie Jin), the main protagonist, Chunhua, strolls with a friend through an exhibition about the works of the writer Lu Xun. They stop at a woodblock print of Sister Xianglin, a character from Lu Xun’s famous short story “New Year’s Sacrifice” (Zhufu; 1924). Chunhua looks intently at the figure of Sister Xianglin, a beggar woman who has suffered greatly in her life because of a patriarchal social system that prevents her from choosing her own marital fate, and she has something of an epiphany: she under­ stands through this displayed image how her own suffering is tied to the suffering of many others in society. The filmmaker makes this explicit by superimposing an image of a younger Chunhua on top of the woodblock print. In this way, Chunhua’s political consciousness is raised; she comes to see herself as part of a class of oppressed people, allowing her to join actively in the socialist political movement. This scene captures the ideological and social function of museums devoted to literature— and many of the other types of museums discussed in this book—in the PRC. In the spring of 2005, the real Lu Xun Memorial Hall in Beijing held an exhibit on the life and works of the contemporary writer Wang Xiaobo. According to one source, this was the first exhibit devoted to a single contemporary Chinese writer.1 Although promoted by his wife, Li Yinhe, a noted sociologist and sexologist, the exhibit was remarkable because it was housed in the Lu Xun Memorial Hall. Though never a communist himself, Lu Xun was coopted by the CCP and shaped into a symbol of the revolutionary cause. The Beijing Lu Xun Memorial Hall, established in 1956, was an important part of this canonizing of Lu Xun as a great revolutionary writer. Wang Xiaobo, who died in 1997 and who wrote most of his works in the 1990s when China was in the throes of marketization, is a very different kind of writer. For one, he openly wrote about sex, a subject that Lu Xun meticulously avoided (some might say repressed) in his works. Furthermore, Wang’s writing often mocked the very notion of revolution, for which Lu Xun was made to stand. As Wendy Larson (2007) puts it, Wang’s “writing eats away at the immediacy, deeply held emotion, 178 Chapter 8 clear-cut expression of position, optimism, and drive toward progress that make up the revolutionary spirit.” Yet both writers are fundamentally ironic, and in this irony they can be said to be kindred literary spirits. The example of the Wang Xiaobo exhibit held within the Lu Xun Memorial Hall shows us some of the cultural dualities and complexities of postsocialist, neoliberal China, both celebrating the cynicism of Wang Xiaobo and commemorating the “revolutionary” Lu Xun. That the apparently contradictory values represented by these two writers appear side by side, in the same exhibitionary space, reflects the paradoxes of contemporary China. The Wang Xiaobo exhibit suggests that the literary transformation long transpiring in post-Mao China is finally getting recognition in official state exhibitionary spaces. As I discuss below, however, the Modern Literature Museum in Beijing, the most official of literary museums in the PRC, has been slow to incorporate writers such as Wang Xiaobo into its exhibits, which trace the history of modern Chinese literature from the late Qing to contemporary times and highlight literary luminaries of the Republican era. Along with literary histories, compendia, university literature departments, and academic conferences, state literature museums have contributed to shaping a canon of modern Chinese literature and a canonical interpretation of its origins and development, which in turn are important components of the discourse of nationalism and national identity. State literature museums are important agents in the public construction of a national literature for a broad citizenry composed largely of people who are not well educated and who often do not read the great works of the modern canon. Scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu (1993) and John Guillory (1993) show us that literature does not exist in some rarefied realm apart from society and politics—it is as enmeshed in social and political praxis as any other human endeavor. And as any­ where, the writing and interpretation of literary history and the formation of literary canons in China was and continues to be a highly ideological and politicized...

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